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THE PEACE 
IN THE 
MAKING 



THE PEACE IN 
THE MAKING 



BY 



H. WILSON HARRIS 

Author of "President Wilson, His Problem* 
and His Poliqf" 



WITH MAPS 




NEW YORK 
E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY 

681 FIFTH AVENUE 



Copyright, 1920, 
By E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY 



AU Rights Reserved "T\ / a_ A, 

192,0 



Printed In the United States of America 

APk i 1 1920 
©CI.A565573 



PREFACE 

MY aim in writing this book has been to 
present something that is a little more 
than a personal impression, and a good 
deal less than a considered history, of the Peace 
Conference. The latter task will be taken in 
hand in dne time by more competent hands than 
mine, and it will make its appeal to its own spe- 
cial public. What I have endeavoured to produce 
is an account, checked by such official documents 
as are available, which will convey to the general 
reader some not wholly inadequate impression 
both of what the Conference did and how it 
did it. 

During the three months I spent at Paris as 
Special Correspondent of the Daily News at the 
Peace Conference I was unexpectedly, as well as 
undeservedly, fortunate in the contacts various 
persons intimately concerned in the making of 
Peace allowed me to establish with them. While 
there are many conversations that must still re- 
main confidential, enough may be said to convey 
what is not an entirely external view of the trans- 
actions at Paris. 

I am greatly indebted to certain personal friends 



vi PREFACE 

with special knowledge who have read different 
portions of the book and made suggestions of 
much value regarding it. If I do not mention 
their names it is because I have no right to asso- 
ciate them with any kind of responsibility for 
what I have written. 

H. W. H. 
October, 1919. 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGB 

I. THE ARMISTICE AND AFTER 1 

II. SETTING THE STAGE 5 

III. THE CONFERENCE MACHINE 14 

IV. THE DISCUSSIONS IN BRIEF 29 

V. SOME PERSONAL FACTORS 46 

VI. NEW MAPS FOR OLD 71 

VII. THE BILL FOR DAMAGES 97 

VIII. LENIN AND BELA KUN 116 

IX. BUILDING THE LEAGUE 139 

X. THE CONFERENCE AND LABOUR .... 158 

XI. THE FEEDING OF EUROPE 168 

XII. WHAT CAME OF IT ALL 180 

XIII. AND NOW ? 197 

APPENDICES 

I. THE GERMAN TREATY 207 

II. THE AUSTRIAN TREATY 214 

III. BROCKDORFF-RANTZAU ON THE GERMAN TREATY 217 

IV. GENERAL SMUTS ON THE GERMAN TREATY 219 
V. THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS COVENANT . 222 

vii 



MAPS 



paob 



the new Germany Facing 71 

THE NEW AUSTRIA " 76 



THE PEACE IN 
THE MAKING 



THE PEACE IN THE MAKING 

Chapter I 
THE ARMISTICE AND AFTER 

ON November 11th, 1918, the Armistice be- 
tween the Allied and Associated Powers on 
the one hand and the German Government 
on the other was signed at Marshal Foch's head- 
quarters. Peace had, to all appearance, been re- 
stored to the world. It was a sure instinct that 
impelled London and Paris to spontaneous cele- 
brations unique in their history. The war was 
over. The bloodshed was ended. The lights 
could go up. The seas were safe. The principles 
of Peace had been agreed. All that remained 
was to work out their application and translate 
them into the approved phrasing of a diplomatic 
instrument. 

That was the assumption, and a perfectly just 
assumption. Germany had collapsed swiftly at 
the end, but the armistice preliminaries had been 
negotiated in no panic haste. It was as early as 
October 5th that the first proposal was advanced, 
and as late as November 11th that the armistice 
itself was signed. The decisive document, indeed, 



2 The Peace in the Making 

was dated six days earlier, November 5th, exactly 
a month from the day when Prince Max had first 
addressed himself to President Wilson. That 
document, a Note handed by Mr. Lansing to the 
Swiss Minister at Washington for transmission 
to Germany, embodied the concerted declaration 
of the Allies as to the Peace they were ready to 
conclude. 

"The Allied Governments,' ' the effective pass- 
age ran, "have given careful consideration to the 
correspondence which has passed between the 
President of the United States and the German 
Government. Subject to the qualifications which 
follow, they declare their readiness to make peace 
with the Government of Germany on the terms of 
peace laid down in the President's Address to 
Congress of January 8th, 1918, and the principles 
of settlement enunciated in his subsequent Ad- 
dresses." 

The phrasing of the declaration deserves notices 
The language is substantially that employed by 
Prince Max in his original Note of October 5th, 
and adopted by Dr. Solf in his further Note of a 
week later, which stated that "the German Gov- 
ernment has accepted the terms laid down by 
President Wilson in his Address of January 8th, 
and in his subsequent Addresses." 

By November 5th, therefore, the ground was 
cleared. The parties were at one. A series of 
exploratory and explanatory Notes had passed 
between Washington and Berlin in the preceding 
month, and at the end the Allies and Germany 



The Armistice and After 3 

were agreed on the conclusion of a peace based 
on President Wilson's Address of January 8th — 
the Fourteen Points speech — and his subsequent 
Addresses. To put it more briefly, they were 
agreed on a Fourteen Points peace, subject only 
to certain definite reservations specified in the 
Lansing Note of November 5th. 

The armistice terms ran to thirty-five clauses. 
They provided, inter alia, for the surrender by 
Germany of munitions and rolling-stock and war- 
ships, for her evacuation of Allied territory and 
the occupation of her territory by the Allies, for 
the repatriation of Allied prisoners and the con- 
tinuance of the Allied blockade. The terms were 
crushing, but Germany had been warned before 
she signed that they would be crushing. They 
were, moreover, armistice terms, not peace terms. 
Beyond the armistice, which was to run in the 
first instance for thirty-six days, there lay what 
the Allies had pledged themselves should be a 
Fourteen Point peace. With that pledge to jus- 
tify them before their people the German pleni- 
potentiaries signed. 

That first step taken, the question of the second 
step arose. If the Allies had handled the situa- 
tion, as it then stood, differently there might have 
been no Paris Conference at all. Certainly there 
would have been no sessions of worn-out dele- 
gates dragging on into the last days of June. A 
sound and practical proposal was put forward at 
the meeting of Allied delegates convoked at Ver- 
sailles to discuss the armistice conditions. It was 



4 The Peace in the Making 

urgent, its principal sponsor contended, that a 
preliminary peace should be signed at the earliest 
moment possible. Such a peace could be framed 
then and there by the delegates already assem- 
bled. There could, of course, be no elaboration of 
details. The task of applying President Wilson's 
formulae point by point must necessarily be de- 
ferred. But what might be described as a "maxi- 
mum peace" could be concluded forthwith. Ger- 
many, that is to say, could have certain terms both 
territorial and financial, laid before her, repre- 
senting the utmost that could be asked of her in 
the final settlement, though in actual fact the just 
working-out of the Fourteen Points would almost 
certainly reduce her liability below that maxi- 
mum. Such a peace, it was submitted, could be 
drawn up in a week. Germany in her then temper 
could be counted on to sign it without cavil. The 
blockade could be lifted, prisoners could be repa- 
triated, arrested production could be resumed, the 
peril of Bolshevism in Germany averted, the 
shadow of famine throughout Europe largely dis- 
pelled. 

That proposition the Allies as a whole rejected. 
Mr. Lloyd George was bent on an election that 
would deprive Great Britain of a Government with 
power to represent it till late in December. M. 
Clemenceau had other reasons for desiring post- 
ponement. Actually ten fatal weeks were allowed 
to drift by before the Peace Conference formally 
opened at Paris. 



Chapter II 
SETTING THE STAGE 

IT was inevitable that the Peace Conference 
should be held at Paris. Geneva, as a neutral 
city, was indeed momentarily suggested, but 
never seriously considered. That the delegates 
should sit in an Allied capital was taken for grant- 
ed, and of Allied capitals only two were practical- 
ly possible. Washington was out of the question 
on grounds of distance ; Brussels, just freed from 
four years of German occupation, could have 
neither housed nor fed the delegations ; Borne had 
no claims to put forward comparable to those of 
London and Paris. 

And between London and Paris there was no 
serious contest. France had, throughout the war, 
been the warden of the marches. Against the 
rampart of her trench-scored hills and plains the 
tide of invasion had surged. She had borne the 
supreme burden and supported the supreme suf- 
fering. Her richest provinces had been scarred 
and ravaged. It was her greatest soldier who had 
led the Allies to victory. Paris, moreover, placed 
as it was on the direct road between Rome and 
London, had from 1915 been the natural meeting- 
place for Allied statesmen. All their chief coun- 
cils had been held there — either in the city itself 

5 



6 The Peace in the Making 

or at Versailles — and it was there that the discus- 
sions that determined the armistice conditions 
took place. The war once ended it was to Paris 
that the Allied sovereigns instinctively repaired. 
King George and King Albert and King Victor 
all visited the city in succession in November and 
December to salute the ransomed Eepublic, and 
it was to Paris that President Wilson travelled 
direct from America. 

That the conference should be the Paris Con- 
ference, therefore, hardly needed deciding. Yet 
almost before its members had settled seriously 
to work it was clear that a worse place for the 
discussions could hardly have been chosen. The 
business of the delegates was to apply agreed 
principles to concrete situations. At the best 
their task was full of delicacy. They had to de- 
cide not merely between conflicting interests, but 
between interests so nicely poised as to tax the 
discrimination of the judges to the utmost. But 
the essential fact was that they were there as 
judges, not as advocates, and judges not of crim- 
inals delivered up for sentence, but of the appli- 
cation of principles to which the formal assent 
of the Allies should have given compelling force. 
It was necessary before all things that the tem- 
per of the Conference should be dispassionate and 
judicial. It was necessary before all things that 
the atmosphere in which the delegates lived and 
worked should be untainted by influences calcu- 
lated to stimulate partisanship and deflect jus- 
tice from its course. 



Setting the Stage 7 

In the fulfilment of those conditions Paris con- 
spicuously failed. Throughout the Conference its 
atmosphere was charged with over-strained emo- 
tions. The city, so far as it could be personified 
as a whole, was passionate in its nationalism. It 
was clamorous in its demands for redress, not 
always distinguishable from revenge. It lapsed 
unprovoked into suspicions and jealousies. It 
was agitated to the point of demoralisation by 
fears for the future. 

That is written in no spirit of criticism or re- 
proach. Everything Paris was during the Confer- 
ence was condoned, and more than condoned, by 
what she had been through the war. Paris is 
more than a city. She is the heart of France, 
far more than London is the heart of England. 
For four years she had been the nerve-centre of 
the national resistance. The population of the 
invaded areas had fled to her for refuge. In 1914, 
and again four years later, the enemy's guns had 
reverberated among her houses. Through the 
last months of the war, the months most recent 
in memory, shells had fallen day by day and 
bombs dropped night by night in her streets. 
What wonder, if after it all, Paris showed some 
symptoms, as more than one commentator put it, 
of shell-shock? 

But if what Paris was is no reproach to Paris it 
made the city the worst of all possible settings 
for such a Conference as the world looked for 
when the armistice was signed. No feature of 
Paris justified that criticism more than its Press. 



8 The Peace in the Making 

The number of daily papers published in the 
French capital is astonishing. As purveyors of 
news they cannot compare, as a whole, with the 
London Press. As organs of propaganda, run in 
most cases at a loss by an individual proprietor 
with strong views or in the interests of some sec- 
tional cause, they have no parallel in England. 
Most of them, moreover, are frankly venal. With- 
in limits their editorial, as well as their advertise- 
ment, columns are for sale. They can, to put it 
rather more delicately, be subsidised for particu- 
lar purposes. 
/ It is easy to conceive what that meant in a city 
crowded with delegates of rival nations, each in- 
tent on getting public hearings for its individual 
claims. A plenipotentiary of one not inconsid- 
erate power was declared at a crisis in the Confer- 
ence to have taxed M. Clemenceau privately with 
his personal opposition to the expressed will of 
France on the issue of the moment. "What do 
you mean by the expressed will of France V asked 
the President of the Council. "Look at your 
Press," answered his critic. "Every paper ex- 
cept Bebats and VHumcmite is supporting our 
claims. ' ' Clemenceau looked straight at his inter- 
locutor and then down at the bureau at which he 
was sitting. "Do you want me to open that draw- 
er," he said, "and show you the list of the sums 
you have been paying to the Paris papers!" His 
visitor decided on reflection that he did not. 

That story may or may not be true — though it 
is in fact better authenticated than most. The 



Setting the Stage 9 

point is that no one who heard it or retailed it in 
Paris thought for a moment of dismissing it as 
prima facie incredible. If it did not happen it 
might just as well have happened. That was one 
kind of influence operating on the Paris Press. ^ 
Another was the relationship, more direct or less 
direct, in which most papers stood to the Quai 
d'Orsay. When a government department in any- 
country has important news to dispense the pa- 
pers have a strong inducement to keep in its 
good graces by furthering its policy. Nowhere is 
that weakness of human nature put to better use 
than at the French Foreign Office. And to com- 
plete the picture it must be added that the three 
English and American dailies in Paris were all 
of a pronounced anti-Liberal colour. 

These factors cannot be left out of account. The 
papers inevitably made the atmosphere of the 
Conference. All of them, whether clerical, roy- 
alist or republican — all in fact except avowed So- 
cialist organs — poured out a daily stream of prop- 
aganda in the interests primarily of France and 
her claims, and secondarily of whatever nation- 
ality a particular paper might have reason to 
champion. Responsible delegates, it may be con- 
tended, would rise superior to such influences as 
these. Even responsible delegates, it must be re- 
plied, are human. Public opinion has and must 
have its weight in such situations. 

It may be questioned whether the Paris Press ** 
did actually represent the public opinion of 
France. But it wore all the appearance of rep- 



io The Peace in the Making 

resenting it. And the fact that every delegate, 
and every member of every commission attached 
to the delegations, and every journalist charged 
with interpreting the Conference to his country- 
men at home, imbibed morning by morning as the 
first intellectual diet of his day, the ex parte ex- 
pression of one particular point of view, based on 
one particular political doctrine and dictated by 
a particular sectional or national interest, did un- 
questionably create a force of prejudice and par- 
tisanship for whose effects too little allowance 
s^has been made. 

It is easy, as has been said, to excuse the ex- 
aggerated nationalism of France in view of what 
France had suffered. But there was more in it 
than a mere reaction from the strain of four years 
of war. France's attitude was determined by a 
double and overmastering fear. Half of it was 
the fear of renewed German aggression. Twice 
in fifty years France had been invaded by the 
same enemy. She thought and spoke of those at- 
tacks as utterly unprovoked. She had no memory 
for Napoleon's intransigeance in 1870, and no re- 
gard for the part played by the balance of power 
system and the Eussian alliance in 1914. She put 
no trust in the power of any political instrument 
like the League of Nations to protect her in the 
future. Her hope of security rested solely on 
the emasculation of Germany and a new strategic 
frontier for defence. 

That was one fear, the military. The other 
was the economic. France had failed hopelessly 



Setting the Stage II 

to face her financial situation while the war lasted. 
She had refused to impose new taxes. She had 
piled up a prodigious debt. (Her war costs to 
March, 1918, totalled 182,000,000,000 francs^ 
nearly £7,300,000,000) . She had poured out paper 
money in streams. By the end of the war every 
statesman who faced the facts squarely read in 
them the menace of imminent bankruptcy. The 
one hope was a vast indemnity. It was that hope 
that had governed the conduct of French finance 
throughout the war. It was the desperate need 
of such a remedy that dictated the attitude of 
French politicians and people on financial discus- 
sions throughout the Conference. No one will be 
disposed to pass a harsh judgment on France for 
her preoccupation with her own perils. It is 
stressed here only to emphasise the part it played 
in creating the environment that surrounded the 
Conference. 

It was on such a stage that the actors began to 
take their places towards the end of December, 
1918. The representatives of the British Domin- 
ions had been gathering for some weeks before. 
Col. House was already an old inhabitant of Paris, 
and President Wilson had brought other members 
of the American delegation with him on the 
George Washington in the middle of December. 
The Japanese arrived late, but the beginning of 
January found most of the delegations with their 
retinues of officials establishing themselves in 
Paris. The British Government had secured for 
its headquarters the Majestic and Astoria and two 



12 The Peace in the Making 

or three smaller hotels, near the Arc de Triomphe. 
Mr. Lloyd George and Mr. Balfour took up resi- 
dence a few hundred yards away in the Rue Nitot, 
and President Wilson, who at first lived in the 
Villa Murat, near the Pare Monceau, settled down 
a minute's walk from the British Prime Minister 
in the Place des Etats Unis. The American dele- 
gation as a whole was installed at the Crillon in 
the Place de la Concorde, the Italians were at the 
Edouard VII., the Japanese at the Bristol in the 
Place Vendome, the Belgians at the Lotti close by, 
and the Chinese at the Lutetia on the south of 
the river. The smaller nations represented found 
various abiding-places, and apart from them there 
arrived to hover on the outskirts of the Confer- 
ence sundry delegations armed with nothing bet- 
ter than a claim — which in most cases remained 
entirely unrecognised — to a locus standi in the 
discussions. Among such were the Persians and 
Egyptians, and Esthonians, and Georgians, and 
Armenians, while in the third month of the sit- 
tings a new liveliness was infused into the proceed- 
ings by the arrival of a particularly active Irish- 
American delegation, intent on securing from the 
Conference an understanding that direct consid- 
eration should be given to the claims of the Irish 
Republic. 

In one respect the small nations struck a new 
note in Paris. For the most part ruled out of 
court by the Conference itself, they applied them- 
selves as an alternative to impressing public opin- 
ion outside. There were two ways of conducting 



Setting the Stage 13 

that kind of propaganda, through the newspapers 
and through pamphlets and other specialised lit- 
erature. To those expedients, therefore, every 
nation desirous of stating a case betook itself. 
The presses of Paris poured out a ceaseless stream 
of propaganda literature, Polish and Esthonian 
and Korean and Georgian and Kussian (anti- 
Bolshevik) and Chinese. Even the Japanese did 
not disdain to reply unofficially through this me- 
dium to allegations in regard to Shantung. At the 
same time invitations to educative lunches and 
propaganda dinners poured in from every side on 
the Ajllied journalists and anyone else whose in- 
fluence on the public was of any account. How 
much came of it all is a matter of opinion. No one 
intent on following seriously the main stream of 
the Conference had much time to spare for its 
tributaries. But the small nations, among whom 
the Poles had developed their propaganda into 
almost a tour de force of efficiency, did at least 
succeed in keeping themselves and their troubles 
before the public mind. They had undeniably a 
place, even though a very minor place, on the 
stage of the Conference. They intensified the 
sense of the complexity and magnitude of the 
problems to be solved, and their activities keyed 
up the general tension of Paris to a still higher 
pitch. They were essentially a part of the setting. 



Chaptee III 
THE CONFERENCE MACHINE 

BY the middle of January the component 
parts of the Conference machine were as- 
sembled. The plenipotentiaries of each 
Power were in Paris, with small armies of perma- 
nent officials and other advisers to support them. 
The Hotel Astoria became a miniature Whitehall. 
The Foreign Office, the Board of Trade, the Treas- 
ury, the War Office, had each made its contribu- 
tion. In the week the Conference opened the prin- 
cipal officials attached to the British delegation 
numbered two hundred, but that figure was multi- 
plied several times by the addition of typists and 
other subordinates. There was further a large 
staff of telegraphists, Scotland Yard men, motor- 
drivers and printers. A detail which need figure 
less prominently in permanent than it did in con- 
temporary record, was the grant by the British 
Government of dress allowances to its officials of 
both sexes at the rate of £30 for men and £25 for 
women. 

Similar organisations were set up by the other 
Powers. France, of course, had her own civil 
service on the spot. At the Crillon the American 
delegates could call on particularly competent 

14 



The Conference Machine 15 

panels of advisers, built up by the selection of the 
ablest university and business men in the United 
States in addition to the regular Government offi- 
cials. The work was necessarily specialised, and 
at any moment data or documents on any question 
that might emerge were ready for the call of the 
national plenipotentiaries. In the case of Great 
Britain each of the Dominion Premiers brought 
a small secretariat, and frequent meetings of the 
British Empire Delegation as a whole were held. 
In addition there was a general British secreta- 
riat, with Sir Maurice Hankey at its head. 

One important element in the British represen- 
tation was the contingent of M.I. (Military Intel- 
ligence) men, who came and went ceaselessly be- 
tween Paris and every remote corner of Europe. 
Their collective knowledge was immense, being 
rivalled only, if at all, by the store of information 
amassed by the Food Administration through its 
ubiquitous agents. They formed part of a group 
of soldiers who showed that to be military is not 
of necessity to be militarist, as witness a coterie 
who used to sit far into the night discussing the 
League of Nations as an antidote to Bolshevism; 
or the General who circulated a memorandum 
pointing out that armies were instruments for im- 
posing one's political will on some one else, not 
for reconstructing the world, and that if the latter 
was the object a more effective agency was the 
Y. M. C. A. 

Such details as these are of value only as show- 
ing the working material available at Paris. None 



16 The Peace in the Making 

of the organisations touched on was intended in 
the first instance for the service of the Conference 
as a whole. The business of each national contin- 
gent was merely to prepare briefs for its own 
plenipotentiaries. Fortunately some co-ordina- 
tion was later effected through the medium of 
Conference commissions. 

It was, then, on such a stage as was described 
in the last chapter, and with such equipment as 
has been outlined in this, that the Conference 
faced its task in the middle of January. It met 
without principle and without plan. The French, 
as hosts of the Conference, had indeed prepared 
some suggestions on procedure, but they never got 
far beyond the stage of suggestion. In any case 
principle was more important than plan, and it 
was on principle that the Conference registered 
its first serious failure. 

That failure consisted in a complete neglect to 
realise what had preceded the Conference. If 
Germany had surrendered unconditionally, if 
there had been no agreement as to the nature of 
the peace to be concluded, the Conference would 
have been justified in laying down its own princi- 
ples and applying them as it chose. In the case of 
Austria and Turkey and Bulgaria, it was so jus- 
tified. But Germany had not surrendered uncon- 
ditionally. She had surrendered on the strength 
of the Allies' pledge in the Lansing Note of No- 
vember 5th. That, and that alone, governed the 
conditions of the coming peace, for the detailed 
stipulations of the armistice of November 11th 



The Conference Machine 17 

affected only the armistice period and not the per- 
manent settlement. 

The position, therefore, was clear, so far at least 
as relations with Germany were concerned. She 
was disarmed and powerless, the Allies could do 
with her what they would. But they had already 
pledged themselves to do with her one particular 
thing — to make peace with her on the basis of the 
Fourteen Points. That being so, the function of 
the Conference was plain. Its business was to con- 
stitute itself, or to constitute out of itself, a judi- 
cial body, charged with interpreting in the light 
of the existing situation the agreed formula — the 
Fourteen Points and the contents of the subse- 
quent addresses — much as the United States Su- 
preme Court interprets the provisions of the 
agreed formula known as the American Constitu- 
tion in regulation of differences between State 
and State or between a State and the Union. 
President Wilson was a member of the American 
delegation. If there was anything obscure in his 
addresses he was there to give an authoritative 
definition of its meaning. Steering their course 
by that clear principle the Allies might have 
avoided half the difficulties that obstructed and 
protracted their discussions till the breakdown of 
the whole negotiations was menaced. 

But the Conference at the outset agreed neither 
on this principle nor on any other. Each Allied 
nation knew very clearly what it wanted for itself, 
but apart from that its delegates came to Paris 
with their minds receptively blank. On the vital 



1 8 The Peace in the Making 

question of whether the Germans, as parties to the 
terms on which the war was ended, were to have 
some say in the interpretation of those terms, or 
whether the Allies were to draft their own peace 
and simply hand it to the Germans to sign, no 
agreement or understanding had been reached. 

The middle of January, therefore, found some 
sixty or seventy delegates assembled, all in con- 
siderable perplexity as to how to begin. They 
were too large a body for detailed discussion — 
though that was not fully realised until later,- — 
and at the same time the leading personalities 
were not reconciled to the loss of authority that a 
subdivision of functions would have involved. The 
principal Powers indeed took charge of the pro- 
ceedings before the Conference had actually 
opened at all. January 14th saw the first of a 
series of preliminary sittings attended by the rep- 
resentatives of Great Britain, America, France 
and Italy, with the Japanese sometimes present 
and sometimes not. This body was virtually a 
continuation of the Supreme Inter- Allied Council, 
which had sat during the later stages of the war 
at Versailles. For the purposes of the moment 
it was self-appointed, having as yet no formal 
status as a constituent part of the Conference. 
That, indeed, would have been impossible, for the 
Conference itself had no formal existence till after 
its first Plenary Session was held. 

That session was fixed for January 18th, but 
before it took place an important little contro- 
versy had to be fought out. It had so far been as- 



The Conference Machine 19 

sumed that the Conference would carry out its 
work with the maximum of publicity. The first of 
President Wilson's Fourteen Points, with its in- 
sistence on "open covenants of peace openly ar- 
rived at," was to all appearance decisive on that. 
An unprecedented assemblage of journalists of all 
nations, white, yellow, and black, had gathered at 
Paris. The French Government had provided as\ 
an Inter- Allied Press Club, the Maison Dufayel, a 
vast and ornate mansion in the Champs filysees.^- 
It had further been conceded that while the censor- 
ship over all papers published in France would 
remain there should be no interference whatever 
with the outward messages of British and Ameri- 
can correspondents. In spite of these elaborate 
provisions for acquainting the public of the world 
with the work of the Conference the council of 
major Powers three days before the opening of 
the Conference promulgated an astonishing fiat. 
Not only was the Press to be excluded from the 
sittings of the Conference, but members of the 
Conference were to be pledged to have no com- 
munication with journalists, while the Press on 
its part would be prohibited from publishing any 
information on the discussions beyond what would 
be contained in a daily official communique. 

So intolerable an attempt to swathe the pro- 
ceedings of the Conference in secrecy from the 
outset was met by immediate and vigorous pro- 
tests. The American journalists exerted pressure 
on President Wilson, the British on Mr. Lloyd 
George. Their case was so unanswerable that 



20 The Peace in the Making 

the statesmen had perforce to yield. In the words 
of the old jingle, 

They rose to deny 
That they meant to imply 
Just so much as their words seemed to indicate. 

A compromise was struck on the understanding 
that 

"representatives of the Press shall be admit- 
ted to the meetings of the Full Conference, but 
on necessary occasions the deliberations of the 
Conference may be held in camera." 

That arrangement was on the face of it reason- 
able. No one could take exception, having regard 
to the delicacy and moment of the issues under 
discussion, to occasional sessions in camera. None 
the less the initial zest for secrecy inevitably gave 
rise to disturbing reflections, which the subse- 
quent course of the Conference went very far to 
justify. The whole proposal as to publicity turned 
out, moreover, to be mere window-dressing. Hav- 
ing consented to admit the Press to Plenary Ses- 
sions of the Conference the Five-Power delegates 
effectively eluded the Press by holding practically 
no Plenary Sessions at all, and making them, when 
they were held, mere instruments for the auto- 
matic endorsement of decisions arrived at in se- 
cret by the Five-Power Council. 

Altogether in the whole five months and more 
between January 18th and June 28th, when the 
German Peace was signed, no more than six Plen- 



The Conference Machine 21 

ary Sessions took place, five of them open to the 
Press and one held in camera. As landmarks of 
the Conference they are worth a word of indi- 
vidual mention. The first, on January 18th, 
marked the formal inauguration of the Confer- 
ence.* At it M. Clemenceau was elected perma- 
nent chairman of the Conference, and a general 
secretariat, with M. Dutasta, an official of the 
French Foreign Office, at its head, was created. 
At the second, a week later, a Commission was ap- 
pointed to draft the League of Nations Covenant, 
and the opportunity was taken by the small na- 
tions (if that term can properly be applied to 
states of the area of Brazil, and the population of 
China) to make a bitter but unavailing protest 
against the autocratic usurpation of authority by 
the five major Powers. At the third Plenary Ses- 
sion, on February 14th, the first draft of the 
League of Nations Covenant was presented. At 
the fourth, on April 11th, the Commission on In- 
ternational Labour Legislation laid its report be- 
fore the Conference. At the fifth, on April 28th, 
the final draft of the Covenant of the League of 
Nations was approved. At the sixth, on May 6th, 
the eve of the presentation of the treaty to Ger- 
many, the delegates of the lesser Powers had com- 
municated to them in secret session the terms of 
the peace that had been formulated for them by 
President Wilson, Mr. Lloyd George and M. Cle- 
menceau. 

* The number of delegates each nation was to have had already 
been decided by the Five-Power Group. 



22 The Peace in the Making 

That, apart from the ceremonies of the presen- 
tation and signature of the treaties, represented 
the total of the public activities of the Conference. 
All its real work was done behind rigidly closed 
doors. (It is true that the Press of Great Britain, 
/ America, France and Italy, each had a liaison offi- 
cial, who transmitted whatever information the 
national plenipotentiaries saw fit to dispense. The 
Americans, indeed, were received every evening 
by Col. House, and the Italians by Signor Orlando. 
In the same way Mr. Lloyd George or Mr. Balfour 
or Lord Robert Cecil occasionally addressed Brit- 
ish journalists. But if the public of the different 
countries had been dependent on such semi-official 
disclosures for their knowledge of decisions that 
were settling the fate of the world they would 
have been blindfolded even more effectively than 
they were. Speaking generally all the news that 
was worth getting was obtained by individual 
journalists through personal investigation and en- 
quiry. 

On one ground the virtual abolition of Plenary 
Sessions could be defended. Such sessions as were 
held proved the system to be utterly unworkable. 
As it was no one even affected to take them seri- 
ously, except perhaps the delegates from Panama 
or Uruguay, to whom the occasion gave a plat- 
form such as they had never dreamed of as they 
wove the spells of their eloquence in their sub- 
tropical forums. The delegates sat at long horse- 
shoe tables in the Clock Room or the banqueting 
hall of the Quai d'Orsay, M. Clemenceau in the 



The Conference Machine 23 

chair, with President Wilson and the American 
delegation on his right, Mr. Lloyd George and 
the British Empire delegation on his left. Crowds 
of secretaries and other officials lined the walls 
behind the delegates. | ^Th e Press was penned in a ^ 
confined space at the encT of the hall./ At an ordi — 
nary public meeting in England there is some at- 
tempt to preserve silence for the speaker. At a 
Plenary Session there was none. The principal 
delegates were frankly bored. They were doing 
the real work of the Conference in a secret con- 
clave. This public ceremony was merely a con- 
cession to the smaller nations and outside opinion. 
Before the sitting had got far President "Wilson 
and M. Clemenceau and Mr. Lloyd George were 
usually busy retailing to each other anecdotes or 
jokes which the privileged officials within earshot 
of their chairs passed on later, with discretion, to 
a wider audience. On one occasion Sir Robert 
Borden stopped in the middle of his speech to pro- 
test that the conversation of the magnates made it 
impossible for him to go on. Speakers from small 
nations, whom no one wanted to hear but them- 
selves, discoursed with great fluency to no pur- 
pose. If any objection of substance was raised 
M. Clemenceau could be relied on to ride it down 
from the chair. Altogether the blasphemers who 
dismissed the Plenary Sessions tersely as "wash- 
outs ' ' hit the nail pretty squarely on the head. 

Plenary Sessions at all events formed a small 
enough feature of the Conference machine. That 
machine consisted essentially of two parts, the 



24 The Peace in the Making 

committee of representatives of the five greater 
Powers, and the various commissions which pre- 
pared the material for that Committee's delibera- 
tions. The adoption of the commission system 
was inevitable. If the ground had not been worked 
over in that way the Conference might have sat till 
1921. As it was, every subject of importance that 
came up for discussion was threshed out by a com- 
mission before the Council of Ten, or Five, or 
Four, tackled it in earnest. In the week after 
the first Plenary Session, an initial group of com- 
missions was formed, — on responsibilities for the 
war and war crimes, on ports, railways and water- 
ways, on international labour and on the League 
of Nations. Others, e.g., on the Saar Valley, Po- 
land, Separations, the Middle East, were appoint- 
ed as occasion demanded. A commission was com- 
posed partly of delegates, partly of permanent of- 
ficials. The smaller nations had some represen- 
tation on it. For the rest their delegates had no 
other function but to appear before the Council 
of the Five Powers and state their national case 
whenever a question that directly affected them 
was under discussion. 

Altogether the treaty with Germany was signed 
by sixty-six* Allied representatives. Of those 
not sixty-six, nor eight, nor five, nor four, were 
responsible for the making of it. It was the work 
actually of three men. The crowd that surged 
in tumultuous enthusiasm round M. Clemenceau, 

* The number should have been sixty-eight, but the two Chinese 
delegates refused to sign. 



The Conference Machine 25 

President Wilson and Mr. Lloyd George, as they 
appeared on the terrace of the Chateau of Ver- 
sailles after the signature of the German Treaty 
knew what it was doing. Sixty-three other men 
had signed the Treaty for the Allies. These three 
men had written it. 

The creation of the Council of Four, which be- 
came in reality a Council of Three, was Mr. Lloyd 
George's doing. The first Cabinet of the Con- 
ference had been a Council of Ten, composed of 
the Premiers and Foreign Secretaries of the five 
major Allied States. That Council began its work 
before the first Plenary Session in January. It 
sat through February. It sat through three weeks 
of March. The remaining fifty odd delegates 
waited. The Allied public waited. Germany, the 
tide of Spartacism rising higher every day, waited 
with the rest. Europe drifted steadily towards 
dissolution. Nothing was settled. Nothing looked 
like being settled. Reports were received from 
commissions and referred back to commissions 
again. The paralysis of indecision had become 
chronic. 

The fourth week-end in March, Mr. Lloyd 
George spent at Fontainebleau with Mr. Montagu, 
the Secretary for India, and one or two other 
advisers. The situation was now desperate. The 
possible break-up of the Conference was being 
seriously canvassed. Something had to be done. 
The British Prime Minister spent his week-end 
in drafting in outline a peace of his own. With 
that in his pocket he went back to Paris on the 



26 The Peace in the Making 

Monday to propose that the Council of Ten should 
be cut down by half, and the major half, now a 
Council of Premiers, apply itself to intensive work 
with his draft as agenda. The remaining half, 
converted into a Council of Foreign Secretaries, 
would be useful (it proved itself in fact singularly 
useless) as a court of appeal on secondary ques- 
tions. 

So what should have been the Council of Five 
was constituted. It happened, however, by a mer- 
ciful dispensation of Providence that the Japanese 
Prime Minister knew no English or French, and 
as the need for translation would seriously check 
the high speed at which the Council was propos- 
ing to work, Marquis Saionzi dropped out of the 
discussions altogether. The Council was now 
down to four. For most of its existence it ac- 
tually sat as four, but it is doing Signor Orlando 
no injustice to say that his presence was of no 
great moment except when Italian affairs were 
under discussion. His three colleagues spoke 
English, while he was at home only with Italian 
and French, and though Capt. Mantoux, the official 
Conference interpreter, was in attendance, the 
Italian Prime Minister could not hope to follow 
the quick ebb and flow of the informal conversa- 
tion out of which the decisions emerged. During 
some of the most critical days of the Council's 
career, moreover, he was absent altogether, hav- 
ing retired to Eome after the issue of President 
Wilson's Fiume manifesto. If the composition of 
the Council had been dictated by regard for in- 



The Conference Machine 27 

dividual capacity instead of by regard for the im- 
portance of states, it would have varied in at least 
one respect. M. Veniselos could not have been 
excluded. 

The Treaty was thus essentially the work of the 
triumvirate. So intimate were their deliberations 
intended to be that at first they dispensed alto- 
gether with a secretary, and no official minutes 
were kept. That arrangement soon came to an 
end, owing to the frequency with which the Coun- 
cil assembled in the morning to find a complete 
divergence of opinion among its members as to 
what had been decided on the previous day. The 
services of Sir Maurice Hankey, the secretary of 
the British Empire delegation, were accordingly 
requisitioned. Even so the discussions were 
marked by the maximum of informality. They 
were, of course, carried on in strict privacy, but 
as experts of all nations were perpetually being 
called in for advice on particular points a good 
many windows into the Council chamber were 
opened. One such occasional visitor reported that 
he found President Wilson at one end of the room 
in consultation with experts, and Mr. Lloyd 
George similarly engaged at the other. Sir Mau- 
rice Hankey vibrated uneasily between the two in 
an attempt to find what they were discussing. Sig- 
nor Orlando, after sitting for a time disconsolately 
by himself, button-holed a disengaged expert and 
quoted Hamlet to him in Italian. M. Clemenceau, 
who was technically presiding, leaned wearily back 
in his chair with the remark, "Let them go on 



28 The Peace in the Making , 

talking. They'll tire themselves out in time." 
Such, according to a witness who claims to be 
trustworthy, was the manner in which the treaty 
with Germany was made. However, that may be, 
the main fact is incontestable. By the end of 
March the Conference machine consisted, for 
practical purposes, of three men sitting usually in 
President Wilson's library or Mr. Lloyd George's 
drawing-room. For four years scores of millions 
of men had looked death in the face. By the end 
of four years ten millions had died. And after it 
all three men took the fate of the world in their 
hands, and by their will the destiny of unborn 
generations was moulded. It may have been the 
only way — in the deadlock into which the Confer- 
ence had drifted, I think personally it was — but it 
was a strange ending to a war for democracy. 



Chapter IV 
THE DISCUSSIONS IN BRIEF # 

OF all the methods of considering the Peace 
Conference the chronological is probably 
as unsatisfactory as any. The Council 
which took charge of the whole proceedings from 
the first week worked on no settled plan. It 
touched spasmodically on this subject or that as 
some convenience of the moment, or it might be a 
mere arbitrary choice, dictated. The one fixed 
principle of the discussions was opportunism. The 
German Treaty, for example, was in an advanced 
state before the Council could make up its mind 
whether that treaty should be signed first and got 
out of the way, or the settlement with Germany, 
Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria and Turkey carried 
through simultaneously. 

None the less there are certain advantages in in- 
cluding the Conference as a whole in one rapid 
survey, and in such a survey the only method to 
follow is the chronological. Conveniently enough 
for that purpose, the discussions divide themselves 
cleanly into four distinct phases, three of them 
completed, the fourth as yet incomplete. The first 
is the era of the Council of Ten ; the second the 

* Most of the matters touched on in this chapter are discussed 
in greater detail elsewhere. 

29 



30 The Peace in the Making 

era of the Council of Four, down to the presenta- 
tion of the German Treaty ; the third the era still 
of the Four, covering the reconsideration, revision 
and signature of the Treaty ; the fourth the era of 
the Supreme Council left in power to carry out the 
mass of unfinished business connected with the 
Austrian, Hungarian, Bulgarian and Turkish set- 
tlements. 

I 

The genesis of the Council of Ten has been de- 
scribed elsewhere. In effect it created itself, but 
was formally authorised by the first Plenary Ses- 
sion of the Conference on January 18th. Its first 
business was to face the question of the settle- 
ment of Eussia in general, and the question of 
Eussian representation at the Conference in par- 
ticular. Out of its deliberations came the Prinkipo 
proposal, which was launched on January 22nd, 
and may be regarded as having finally passed 
from the sphere of practical politics, when the 
date — February 15th — on which the projected con- 
ference should have been held had come and gone. 

Meanwhile various commissions (on Separa- 
tions, Eesponsibilities, Ports and Waterways) 
were appointed and got to work, but the main 
business visibly lagged. The two months and a 
half that had passed since the armistice had had 
its inevitable effect on Europe, and on January 
25th a strongly phrased note was addressed by 
the major Allies at Paris to sundry small nations, 
warning them that any attempt to further their 



The Discussions in Brief 31 

claims to territory by forcible occupation would 
gravely prejudice the ultimate settlement of their 
case. 

A Plenary Session to appoint Commissions on 
the League of Nations and on International La- 
bour regulation, was held on January 25th. That 
was the last time the full Conference was to meet 
for some weeks. The Council of Ten from this 
point took supreme charge, summoning Plenary 
Sessions only as they were needed to give formal 
ratification to the Council 's decisions. The Coun- 
cil itself discussed the disposition of the German 
colonies, the condition of Poland, Reparation, 
Italy's Adriatic claims, Arabia and Syria. In 
connection with the Colonies the mandate princi- 
ple emerged at the end of January, and a few days 
later a notable step was taken in another field in 
the creation of the Supreme Economic Council, 
with Mr. Hoover as American representative and 
Lord Robert Cecil as British. 

The problems of Central and South-east Europe, 
involving the rival claims of Czecho-Slovaks and 
Poles, Jugo-Slavs and Italians, Rumanians and 
Serbs, were insistent enough to suggest that it 
took longer to hold the balance between Allies than 
to settle with the enemy. The Ten received depu- 
tation after deputation, listened to their plaints 
and passed on to the next subject, no visible sign 
of a solution emerging at any point. Everywhere 
claims were being registered. France wanted this ; 
Italy demanded that; Greece insisted on territo- 
rial extension here; Mr. Hughes, of Australia, 



32 The Peace in the Making 

stood pat there. Meanwhile the League of Na- 
tions Commission carried forward its work apace, 
the food missions pursued their humanitarian la- 
bours without advertisement, and one after an- 
other the anti-Bolshevik factions in Russia de- 
clined association with the Prinkipo proposal. 

In the second week in February came a pause in 
the work of the Council. On the 8th Mr. Lloyd 
George returned to London, where Labour trou- 
bles urgently called for his attention, and five days 
later Mr. Wilson sailed for America to deal with 
Bills that needed his signature before Congress 
rose. The dispersal of the chiefs was made the 
occasion for the usual inspired hints that work 
was well forward and the signing of the Treaty 
in sight. It may have been, but it needed pow- 
erful glasses to descry it. 

Germany meanwhile was struggling with Spar- 
tacism, and doubts on the issue of the contest 
opened up grave possibilities for Paris. She had 
failed to fulfil certain armistice obligations, and 
Marshal Foch was urging the tightening of the 
military screw. Against disquiet on that score 
was to be set the completion of the first stage of 
the task of the most diligent Commission of all, 
that on the League of Nations, which presented a 
full draft of the Covenant of the League to a 
Plenary Session of the Conference a few hours 
before Mr. Wilson set sail. 

That happened to be the day on which the pro- 
jected All-Russian conference at Prinkipo should 
have been held. That proposal having ended in 



The Discussions in Brief 33 

smoke, thanks largely to the efforts of the Rus- 
sian emigres in Paris, the militarists had their 
chance of profiting by the conciliators' failure. 
Mr. Lloyd George being in England, Mr. Winston 
Churchill, though neither a delegate to the Peace 
Conference nor a member of the War Cabinet, was 
permitted to fly to Paris by aeroplane and attend 
the Council of Ten to urge a military anti-Bolshe- 
vik policy, backed by expectations of British as- 
sistance, in place of any attempt at negotiation. 
Only two days later an event occurred that gave 
that policy a marked impetus. M. Clemenceau, 
whose bitterness against the Bolsheviks was noto- 
rious, was shot by an assassin close to his house 
in the Rue Franklin, in Passy. Though the 
wounds proved less grave than was feared, to 
take measures in his absence which he would cer- 
tainly have opposed if he were present was out 
of the question. Not only was the final blow dealt 
to the Prinkipo proposal, but any thought of ac- 
tion based on the report brought from Moscow by 
Mr. Bullitt, had, at least for the moment, to be 
abandoned. Interest shifted to other fields, notably 
to the Adriatic, in respect of which the conflict 
between Italy and the Jugo-Slavs took a new 
turn, the Jugo-Slavs proposing to submit the 
whole dispute to arbitration at the hands of Presi- 
dent Wilson, and Italy hastening to put herself 
in the wrong by flatly rejecting that reasonable 
suggestion. 

The beginning of March found the Council of 
Ten resuming serious work. M. Clemenceau, 



34 The Peace in the Making 

making a remarkable recovery, was in his place 
by the end of February, Mr. Lloyd George crossed 
to Paris on March 5th, President Wilson was ex- 
pected in the following week. Armistice and 
blockade questions cropped up, and Mr. Lloyd 
George, reinforcing the urgent representations of 
different food commissioners, created something 
of a sensation by reading a letter from General 
Plumer, dwelling on the discontent caused among 
British soldiers on the Ehine by the spectacle of 
hunger and distress among children in the occu- 
pied area. 

President Wilson's return had the effect of re- 
calling the Council of Ten, not for the first time 
or the last, to a sense of its failure to achieve 
what it had created itself to achieve. Mr. Lloyd 
George was urgently needed in England and was 
preparing to leave Paris, when a joint letter was 
addressed to him by President Wilson, M. Clemen- 
ceau and Signor Orlando, appealing to him to re- 
main for the fortnight which the signatories con- 
fidently hoped would see their labours, so far as 
concerned the German Treaty, completed. The 
Prime Minister stayed, and as though to create an 
impression of progress German financial delegates 
were a few days later, to the scandal of Marshal 
Foch, invited to Versailles. As a matter of fact 
they came not to discuss peace questions, but pure- 
ly Armistice questions, and they went in the end 
not to Versailles but to Pont Maxence, the peril 
of their contiguity to Paris being thus sensibly 
diminished. 



The Discussions in Brief 35 

At this point, Mr. Lloyd George, under circum- 
stances described in an earlier chapter, aban- 
doned the last shreds of his faith in the Council of 
Ten. The sedative influence of a week-end at Fon- 
tainebleau gave him inspiration, and he went back 
to Paris to enunciate the doctrine of peace not by 
committee but by caucus. 

Four men in a library, not ten in a Foreign Of- 
fice salon, were to reshape the world. As things 
stood it was probably the only thing to do, and it 
was done. The ten yielded place unwept to the 
four. They had done much to clear the ground. 
They had brought problems to light, if they had 
not solved them. Their failure, everything con- 
sidered, was not as bad as it looked. But it was 
bad enough. 

II 

The Four hid their deeds behind a veil even 
more opaque than had concealed the endeavours 
of the Ten. The Ten had at least its M. Pichon, 
and though M. Pichon 's weekly communications 
to the Press had usually to be qualified or with- 
drawn altogether as soon as his colleagues saw 
them in print they did at any rate represent some 
concession to the principles of publicity. The 
Four met without a secretary (though that un- 
workable arrangement was altered later), they 
kept no minutes, and the so-called communiques 
handed out through the Press sections of the dif- 
ferent delegations were for the most part hardly 
worth the money it cost to telegraph them. From 



36 The Peace in the Making 

such announcements as were made it appeared 
that the Council was talking of everything in 
general, — Poland, the Saar Valley, Arabia and 
Syria, both banks of the Ehine. All kinds of small 
nations, Georgians, Armenians, Persians, Egyp- 
tian Nationalists, hovered about hoping for a 
hearing, and a singularly active and resourceful 
Irish-American delegation managed to liven up 
the Conference considerably. 

Various members of the Four gave signs of 
spasmodic attempts to speed up their fellows. In 
the first week of April some astonishment was cre- 
ated in circles where the state of the discussions 
was known by an intimation, inspired by Mr. 
Lloyd George, that all the main principles of the 
peace had been settled and that drafting would 
be proceeded with immediately. Simultaneously 
the Prime Minister declared cryptically in an in- 
terview in the Matin (of April 6th) "Wait for a 
fortnight. ' ' The next day it was made known that 
President Wilson had wired to America for his 
ship, the George Washington, then lying at the 
Navy Yard at Brooklyn. There was plenty in all 
this to set the quidnuncs talking, but very little to 
bring peace substantially nearer. 

About this time news of the Bullitt mission and 
report began to leak out — I think I was the first 
to send the facts to England — and was industri- 
ously denied night by night in the House of Com- 
mons. (The Temps, by the way, had just pub- 
lished a notable article advocating the feeding of 
Russia.) The Northcliffe papers meanwhile were 



The Discussions in Brief 37 

attacking the Prime Minister daily for his "ec- 
centric and unstable attitude," and in the middle 
of April Mr. Lloyd George went back to Westmin- 
ster to make his reply to the mass-telegrams des- 
patched by the critics of his supposed attitude on 
indemnities and Russia. The International La- 
bour Charter had at this time just been adopted, 
the Nansen feeding scheme was on the point of be- 
ing approved by the Four, and on the 14th the in- 
vitation to the Germans to send plenipotentiaries 
to Versailles was announced. The end seemed in 
sight at last. There might after all be peace early 
in May. Dates for President Wilson's final de- 
parture from France were bandied confidently 
about — without the smallest authority. 

At this vital point various difficulties, foreseen 
and unforeseen, came to a head. The Germans 
proposed in the first instance to send mere officials 
to Versailles to receive the treaty and take it to 
Weimar for discussion, not despatching plenipo- 
tentiaries till the time for negotiation and signa- 
ture arrived. That project the Allies vetoed per- 
emptorily, and it was promptly abandoned. The 
Fiume controversy was blowing up fast. On April 
22nd, Signor Orlando withdrew from the Council 
of Four. On the 23rd President Wilson issued 
his manifesto. On the 25th the Italian delegation 
left Paris altogether. In their absence the Ger- 
man delegation, headed by Count Brockdorff- 
Rantzau, the Foreign Minister of the German Re- 
public, arrived at Versailles, while the question 
of Shantung was fought out by the Council of 



38 The Peace in the Making 

Three (as it now was) at Paris. Even more im- 
portant, the revised draft of the Covenant of the 
League of Nations was unanimously approved by 
the fifth Plenary Session of the Conference. Prep- 
arations for the presentation of the Treaty went 
forward regardless of Italy, but on May 4th the 
Three formally invited the Italians back, and on 
the morning of the 7th they were in Paris once 
more. The same day the Treaty was presented to 
the German plenipotentiaries at the Trianon Pal- 
ace Hotel, at Versailles. Simultaneously an- 
nouncement was made of the pledge given to 
France by Great Britain and America jointly to 
come to her assistance in case of unprovoked at- 
tack by Germany. On the same day also it was an- 
nounced that a number of mandates * had been al- 
lotted by the Council of Three. 



Ill 

The Germans applied themselves immediately 
to dissecting the Treaty and launching on the Al- 
lies a cloud of notes, which were referred indi- 
vidually to the appropriate commissions of the 
Conference. The main points on which opinion 
among the Allies was divided were the desira- 

* To Great Britain German East Africa; to the Union of South 
Africa German South-West Africa; to the British Empire Naura 
(where is Naura, and what is the British Empire going to do with 
it?); to New Zealand the German Samoan Islands; to Australia 
certain German Pacific islands south of the Equator; to Japan 
German Pacific islands north of the Equator; the mandate for 
Togoland and the Cameroons to be settled between Great Britain 
and Prance. 



The Discussions in Brief 39 

bility of oral discussions, the whole question of in- 
demnity and the admission of Germany to the 
League of Nations. The case for oral negotia- 
tions was strong. Such discussions were being 
carried on daily between Allied and German offi- 
cials on shipping questions, on finance, on food, 
and it could not well be contended that what was 
proper for subordinates in regard to secondary 
matters would be improper for principals in re- 
gard to primary. But the Council of Four, or cer- 
tain members of it, were frankly apprehensive of 
the attempts skilful German diplomatists might 
make to play them off against one another. Presi- 
dent Wilson was definitely in favour of oral dis- 
cussions. Mr. Lloyd George was said to have been 
first for, then against. He was certainly against 
at the end. M. Clemenceau was against all the 
time. The issue was decided accordingly. The 
principal negotiators never met face to face till 
the day of the signing at Versailles. 

In the matter of the indemnity strong pressure 
in favour of some relaxation was exerted both by 
Americans at the Crillon and British at the Ma- 
jestic. On that and other grounds several officials 
attached to the American delegation, offered their 
resignations to President Wilson. The chief rep- 
resentative of the British Treasury, Mr. Maynard 
Keynes, took a similar course a little later. The / \ 
desire of the British and Americans on the League 
of Nations Commission to admit the enemy pow- 
ers to the League without more ado was success- 
fully opposed by the French. 



40 The Peace in the Making 

Germany's intentions, meanwhile, were com- 
pletely in doubt. Would she sign? If so would 
the delegates already at Versailles inscribe their 
names or give place to successors to whom the 
task was less repugnant? No one knew, but the 
Ajllies made a point of referring with calculated 
emphasis to the steps they were ready to take to 
enforce their terms. Finally Count Rantzau went 
to Spa to consult with his fellow-Ministers. About 
the same time, to widen the field of interest, the 
Austrian delegation, headed by Dr. Renner, ar- 
rived at St. Germain, there to wait till the leisure- 
ly progress of the Allies with their treaty should 
reach its term. The Four occupied themselves 
meanwhile with various subsidiary issues, 
Greece's claims in Asia Minor, the difference be- 
tween Belgium and Holland over the Scheldt, the 
recognition of Koltchak, and the disposal of the 
Turkish Empire, a matter on which Mr. Montagu 
and representatives of Mohammedanism in India 
addressed the Council with some force, pointing 
out the dangers that might be run if the complete 
break-up of the great Mohammedan empire were 
attempted. 

While notes continued to fly to and fro between 
Versailles and Paris the Allies themselves were 
arguing out the question of whether the occupied 
area on the Rhine should be administered under 
civil or military law, the civil solution, supported 
by Great Britain and America, finally carrying 
the day in face of Marshal Foch's vigorous op- 
position. On May 29th the German counterpro- 



The Discussions in Brief 41 

posals were handed to the Allies, and their consid- 
eration by the Four began. A factor of real 
importance at this stage was the physical and 
mental exhaustion not only of the four chief ne- 
gotiators, but of the members of the various com- 
missions on which the Four depended for guid- 
ance. It could not have been otherwise, in view 
of the history of the preceding five months, but it 
was none the less a profound misfortune that at 
the moment of all moments when a fresh and dis- 
passionate survey of the whole situation was 
needed it should have to be made by tired men, 
incapable, apart from any question of inclination, 
of applying themselves anew, with unimpaired 
vigour, to work on which they had spent them- 
selves month after month already. In point of 
fact comparatively few changes were made in the 
Treaty. What were made were made largely at 
the instance of the British. On the 1st of June 
a miniature Cabinet meeting was held at Mr. 
Lloyd George's house in the Rue Nitot, all the 
principal Ministers not already in Paris coming 
from England to attend. The whole trend of the 
meeting was toward a moderate settlement, an un- 
expected supporter of that view being Mr. Win- 
ston Churchill, who hinted very broadly, as War 
Minister, that the British Army was in no mood 
for fresh adventures into Germany as an instru- 
ment for imposing a policy of signature by coer- 
cion. 

Through the first fortnight of June the discus- 
sions swung to and fro. In Conference circles 



42 The Peace in the Making 

generally minor issues like the controversy on the 
publication of the Treaty (though the principle 
involved there can hardly be described as minor) 
and the relation between French clericals and the 
would-be founders of a Ehineland Republic, filled 
a stage that might have been occupied with great- 
er things. The Four were working over the 
Treaty afresh, Mr. Lloyd George pressing for cer- 
tain changes of substance, President Wilson show- 
ing something less than his natural enthusiasm 
for modifications that would clearly have nar- 
rowed the gulf which separated the principles of 
the Treaty from the principles of the Fourteen 
Points. The President, it appeared, was in some 
degree discouraged by his failure to carry on the 
first draft what other people, who had given him 
little help then, were now trying to carry on the 
second, and at the same time he was peculiarly 
anxious, both on personal grounds and from a 
vivid consciousness of the daily increasing peril 
of anarchy in Europe, to get the Treaty signed 
and in operation without a day's needless delay. 
That, at any rate, was the view taken of the Presi- 
dent's attitude by persons in close touch with 
him at the time, and there is no reason to distrust 
their judgment. Ultimately some modification of 
the Treaty terms was granted in regard to the 
Saar Valley and the rate of reduction of the Ger- 
man army, the indemnity proposals were made at 
the same time a little less harsh and a little less 
impracticable, a plebiscite was substituted in Up- 



The Discussions in Brief 43 

per Silesia for the proposed naked transfer to Po- 
land. 

Those terms, presented on June 16th, Count 
Brockdorff-Rantzau immediately took back to 
Weimar. Everything now hung on Germany's 
decision. As to that, omniscient rumour took a 
new shape every day. The soundest prophets 
foretold a decision to sign, but not till a new gov- 
ernment was in power. So it turned out. The 
time limit set by the Allies was to expire at 7 p. m. 
on Monday, June 23rd. On Friday, the 20th, the 
Scheidemann administration fell. On the Sunday 
the National Assembly at Weimar authorised a 
new government, with Herr Bauer at its head, to 
sign. At five o'clock on the Monday, two hours 
before the Allied armies were timed to advance, 
the formal assurance was given to the appointed 
representative of the Allies at Versailles. The 
Eiffel Tower wireless feverishly flashed off to the 
Rhine the agreed signal "Fermez les Portes," the 
Mont Valerien batteries crashed out the news to 
Paris, the air-raid syrens took it up, and the bou- 
levards that night allowed themselves their first 
carnival since November 11th. The Germans had 
striven for a further forty-eight hours' respite, 
but the sinking of their fleet two days earlier at 
Scapa did not forward their cause with the Allies, 
and not an hour's grace was conceded. Five days 
later came the crowning act of the weary drama 
in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. 



44 The Peace in the Making 



IV 

The ceremony of the signature over, the Allied 
delegates scattered fast and far. President Wil- 
son and a large contingent of American officials 
left the Gare Montparnasse the same evening for 
Brest, where the George Washington lay with 
steam up. Even so they were not the first away. 
Mr. Massey, the Prime Minister of New Zealand, 
leaving the Hall of Mirrors as soon as the Empire 
delegates had signed, whirled off in a car to the 
Gare St. Lazare, caught the boat train to Havre, 
put to sea in a destroyer awaiting him there, 
boarded the Mauretania in mid-Channel, and be- 
fore most of Paris was in bed had settled well 
down to the Atlantic voyage, en route for home 
via San Francisco and the Pacific. At ten the 
next morning Mr. Lloyd George and the Dominion 
delegates left for London. Twenty hours after 
the Treaty was signed the Conference had faded 
to a mere shadow of itself. 

The Council of Four had gone for ever. In its 
place came a Council, nominally, of Five, on which 
Mr. Balfour represented Great Britain, and Mr. 
Lansing, who soon gave place to Mr. Polk, Amer- 
ica. Mr. Henry White and General Bliss still re- 
mained in attendance. That Council carried 
through the signature of the Austrian Treaty and 
the presentation of the Bulgarian. It discussed 
the eternal problem of Eussia to little purpose, it 
despatched Mr. Hoover to Buda-Pesth, and, stim- 



The Discussions in Brief 45 

ulated by his report, succeeded in checking the 
Rumanian incursion into Hungary. It drafted a 
Hungarian Treaty, and sat down to wait till a 
Hungarian Government should be formed suf- 
ficiently stable to sign it. It resolved to let the 
Turkish settlement slide till America should ac- 
cept or refuse a mandate. It sent a mission to 
Poland to investigate the treatment of the Jews. 
It listened to the report of the American mission 
that had visited Syria. 

But Paris was no longer the diplomatic centre 
of the world. The League of Nations organising 
committee had moved to London before the sign- 
ing of the Treaty. The Supreme Economic Coun- 
cil (now an international body) had followed it. 
Foreign Offices were once more getting busy on 
their own account. The Supreme Council looked 
more like decaying and disappearing than expir- 
ing by any summary act. As I write it is still in 
being. It has signalised its declining days by 
begging Germany to assist it in blockading Rus- 
sia, and by preventing the Peace Treaty from 
coming into force at the time when all conditions 
necessary to its operation had been fulfilled. The 
fate of the Council, it appears at the moment, is 
to make way first for some even paler simulacrum, 
and then for the League of Nations as the su- 
preme diplomatic instrument of the world. 



Chapter V 
SOME PERSONAL FACTORS 

THAT the whole character of the Peace 
Treaty depended in the last resort on the 
personal factors that had gone to its shap- 
ing is self-evident. It was the result not of any 
blind play of forces but of the deliberate volition 
of the three or four men primarily responsible for 
drafting it. In that sense the personalities of the 
three or four men are the only personalities that 
really matter. 

But each member of that inner circle was in his 
turn influenced in greater or lesser degree by cer- 
tain other personalities. Neither President Wil- 
son nor Mr. Lloyd George nor M. Clemenceau re- 
lied on Ms own unaided knowledge and judgment. 
There were obvious reasons why none of them 
should. So far as acquaintance with world poli- 
tics went each one of the three was conspicuously 
ill equipped for the task of settling delicate and 
complex international controversies. Mr. Wilson 
was imbued with the traditional insularity of his 
nation in regard to external affairs. Mr. Lloyd 
George had devoted his public life, down to 1914, 
exclusively to domestic politics. His one excur- 
sion into the foreign field had been the notorious 

4 6 



Some Personal Factors 47 

Agadir speech of 1911. He had never, as he ad- 
mitted with a disarming candour (which, however, 
scandalised a Times leader-writer), heard the 
name of Teschen till it emerged as the bone of con- 
tention between Czecho-Slovaks and Poles. M. 
Clemenceau, from the mere length of his political 
career — he was first elected Deputy in 1871, on the 
morrow of the armistice between Bismarck and 
Favre— was probably better qualified than either 
of his colleagues to pronounce on most of the 
questions at issue. But the French Premier had 
never held the portfolio of Foreign Affairs. He 
had in fact consistently discouraged excursions by 
France into fields where she had no interests at 
stake, and he, like the British Prime Minister 
and the American President, depended largely on 
the knowledge and the counsel of advisers who 
themselves had no status in the sessions of the 
Council. 

In discussing the chief personalities of the Con- 
ference one necessary reservation must be made. 
The veil of secrecy with which the work of the 
Council of Four was shrouded was in the main ef- 
fective. The peacemakers were never under direct 
observation. Even when a statesman's acts and 
words are patent to the world it is no easy matter 
to sketch a portrait of him that critics generally 
will acknowledge as just. When all that can be 
seen of his features is what reveals itself through 
such a smoke-screen as enveloped the Council of 
Four, the task is tenfold more difficult. It is bet- 
ter to emphasise that limitation than to gloss it 



48 The Peace in the Making 

over. My own judgments are based on informa- 
tion acquired from many different sources. They 
are to the best of my knowledge accurate, but the 
last sin I should desire to commit in such a case 
is that of dogmatism. 

Among Conference personalities three natur- 
ally stand out conspicuous. Most of the various 
mots inspired by the triumviri and their work are 
by this time current coin, but one or two may still 
be worth the space it will take to record them. 
The observation that "the worst of President 
Wilson is that he talks like Jesus Christ and acts 
like Lloyd George" stands really to the credit of 
an English M.P., and was conveyed across the 
channel by a fellow Member visiting Paris. But 
M. Clemenceau had already given the simile a 
start. His alleged complaint that "fourteen points 
is a lot for the President to insist on ; le bon Dieu 
lui-meme n'a que dix" may possibly be apoc- 
ryphal. So may the deprecatory reply to some 
critic, "What can I do, sitting there between 
Jesus Christ and Napoleon?" But the French 
Premier's remark that "he liked talking to Col. 
House because he was so practical ;, the President 
talked like Jesus Christ," I know to be authentic. 

Whatever the President talked like, he was with- 
out question the dominating figure of the Con- 
ference. That was inevitable from the outset. 
The Peace formula was his formula, and he was 
necessarily the first authority on its interpreta- 
tion. He was, moreover, head of the one state 
with no financial" or territorial claims to prefer, 



Some Personal Factors 49 

and the one state that remained economically 
powerful at a moment when economic factors 
were determining the destiny of mankind as never 
before. More than that, the President had es- 
tablished by his speeches a moral domination that 
set him on a different level from either of his 
immediate collaborators in the making of peace. 
Though long before the discussions on the German 
Treaty were over half his former admirers were 
attacking him fiercely, Mr. Wilson remained the 
foremost personality at Paris to the last. 

As to the nature of the influence the President 
exerted there is no conflict of opinion. He was 
there to make a Fourteen Points peace, and he did 
his best to make it. He failed in part, but he 
did not fail for want of trying. All through the 
Conference, except, perhaps, during the revision 
of the German Treaty, when Mr. Lloyd George 
suddenly took the field as an apostle of modera- 
tion, Mr. Wilson was the one force on the Coun- 
cil of Four making consistently for "a clean 
peace. ' ' It was in his name that the Prinkipo pro- 
posal was put forward as a solution of the Bol- 
shevist problem, and he gave unhesitating support 
to the later Nansen scheme for the feeding of Rus- 
sia. His natural hostility to the untenable claims 
of French extremists made most of the Paris 
Press his enemy, while his failure to achieve fully 
what he set out to achieve ranged against him 
at the end large sections of his Radical friends 
in Great Britain and America. 

Mr. Wilson was not in every way qualified for 



50 The Peace in the Making 

the role lie had to fill at Paris. He is self-reliant 
to a fault, tending neither to seek nor to welcome 
advice except from one or two chosen counsellors. 
He is not a negotiator, neither had he come to 
Paris prepared for negotiation between acquisitive 
Allies instead of negotiation with Germany. He 
was essentially a judge, not an advocate. His 
fourteen points had been accepted by the Allies, 
and he had come to Europe to apply them, not 
to defend them. On the whole, moreover, the 
magnitude of the powers he had exercised in 
America for two years as Chief Executive in time 
of war formed a poor training for the task of 
subtle negotiation with men enjoying equal status 
with himself at the Conference. 

The President, like many lesser men at the Con- 
ference, was faced by one ever-present problem. 
He had to choose between accepting a settlement 
falling far short of his ideals, and deserting the 
Conference altogether in the knowledge that with- 
out him the settlement would be much worse than 
it was. Evidences of his uncertainty and hesita- 
tion between the two courses are not lacking. The 
most notable was his summons to his ship, the 
George Washington, in April. That was meant 
as a demonstration and a warning, and it was not 
without some effect. But its main value is as a 
side-light on the President 's frame of mind at the 
moment. In the end he stayed on. Two factors 
more than any others determined him on that, one 
of them operative throughout, the other only in 
the latter stages of the Conference. His belief in 



Some Personal Factors 51 

the possibilities of the League of Nations was 
profound. To get that, together with a settlement 
that would at least liberate the dependent nations 
and bear some recognisable resemblance to a 
Fourteen Point Peace, he was ready to sacrifice 
much. He did sacrifice much, perhaps more than 
he realised, but he believed the League would 
have power to right within a reasonable interval 
such wrongs as the Treaty embodied. The second 
factor that weighed with Mr. Wilson was the over- 
whelming need of the world for an early peace at 
almost any cost. The whole of Eastern Europe, 
as he knew well from Mr. Hoover's reports, was 
charged with volcanic ferment due directly to 
economic distress. To that ferment the procras- 
tination of the Conference powerfully contributed. 
It was his recognition of that, his consciousness 
that it was a race between peace and dissolution, 
that led Mr. Wilson at the time of the revision 
of the treaty to resist even delays that might have 
been devoted to the improvement of the terms. 

There was one further difficulty that embar- 
rassed the President. That was political oppo- 
sition at home. The defeat of the Democrats at 
the November elections served to disparage Mr. 
Wilson's authority by suggesting that he was 
speaking at Paris for only a minority of his coun- 
trymen. Criticism by Republicans in the United 
States seemed to confirm that judgment. It would 
have halved the President's difficulties if he had 
thought fit to bring half a dozen Republican Sen- 
ators with him to Paris to study on the spot the 



52 The Peace in the Making 

problems of the Conference and his own attitude 
towards them. 

A similar psychological failure was Mr. "Wil- 
son's sustained omission to visit the devastated 
areas of France. In point of fact the very pres- 
sure exerted to get him there increased his re^. 
luctance to go and see "f rightfulness" exploited. 
But the French never forgave him. It was char- 
acteristic of Mr. Lloyd George 's swiftness to sense 
a situation that he went to see the devastation 
at the first moment possible — and made a speech 
about it at the second. 

One initial mistake, far-reaching in its effects, 
was the President 's failure to take a firm stand at 
the outset against the tradition of secrecy the 
heads of the Conference sought to establish. To 
insist on open covenants openly arrived at does 
not necessarily mean that every informal dis- 
cussion of delicate points shall be reported in the 
Press. But to suggest that the Conference pro- 
ceedings were conducted in the spirit of Point No. 
1 is palpable nonsense. A victory for Mr. Wilson 
on that issue would have meant as much gain as 
a surrender did loss. 

In one other direction the President might have 
done more than he did. By the end of the war 
the United States was the one prosperous country 
in the world. If early in the Peace Conference 
Mr. Wilson had been in a position to assure a 
half -bankrupt Europe that America was prepared 
to back with its vast financial resources a peace 
based on the principles the American President 



Some Personal Factors 53 

had laid down, that offer would have met with a 
warmth of response that would have strengthened 
his hand immensely throughout the negotiations. 
Unfortunately no such offer was made. 

There was one other member of the American 
delegation who exercised a considerable influence 
on the settlement. There might have been more 
than one, but the President is reticent to the point 
of secretiveness. At Paris he saw a number of 
people. Deputation after deputation waited on 
him and got ten or fifteen minutes each. But he 
lived none the less in relative retirement. He 
practically never entertained or dined out. Out- 
side the Council of Four he talked habitually and 
freely to only one man, his long-standing friend 
and confidant, Col. House. There are few par- 
allels to the position Col. House had made. He 
has never held any Federal office in America. It 
may be predicted with certainty that he never 
will. "If you ever hear my name mentioned in 
connection with any office on earth, ' ' he said to me 
once, "you can be sure without asking that the 
rumour is a canard. " He is essentially the power 
behind the throne. The President's thoughts are 
open to him, he criticises the President's speeches 
before they are delivered, and a great deal of 
what the President knows about current affairs 
he knows because Col. House told him. 

Col. House represented America on the Inter- 
Allied War Council before the Armistice. During 
the Conference he had his headquarters at the 
Crillon, and through him the President was kept 



54 The Peace in the Making 

in touch not only with the remaining members 
of the delegation, but with the whole staff of offi- 
cials and advisers. The Colonel's particular forte 
was to smooth out differences. He would have 
made a much worse President than Mr. Wilson, 
but he might have made a better plenipotentiary. 
He is a negotiator through and through — a ne- 
gotiator, be it said, of the best type, shrewd with- 
out a suggestion of cunning, and firm without a 
hint of aggressiveness. Conciliator would per- 
haps be the better word. How many rocks and 
shoals he succeeded in circumnavigating at Paris 
will never be known. His influence, like that of 
all the American representatives, was exerted 
uniformly for the attainment of a moderate peace. 
It is safe to assume — though I have never heard 
him say so — that the settlement reached fell far 
short of his hopes. But he can at least take credit 
for having done more than any other man, except 
perhaps Lord Eobert Cecil, for the safe convoy 
of the League of Nations into harbour. 

In the case of the British delegation as of the 
American two members only weighed heavily 
in the counsels of the Conference. Mr. Bonar 
Law was in charge at Westminster and only paid 
occasional visits of a day or two at a time to 
Paris. Lord Milner concerned himself almost ex- 
clusively with colonial questions, and colonial 
questions for the most part settled themselves. 
Mr. Barnes did much valuable work on the In- 
ternational Labour Commission, but he took little 
part in the general work of the Conference, though 



Some Personal Factors 55 

in the last month he did all that could be done 
behind the scenes to mitigate the rigour of the 
terms finally imposed on the Germans. 

There remain Mr. Lloyd George and Mr. Bal- 
four. It was, of course, on the Prime Minister 
as a member of the Council of Four, that the main 
burden of the negotiations rested. His attitude 
on the Council was too mobile to make it easy 
to define. There was never much doubt about 
President Wilson's position or M. Clemenceau's. 
There was never much certainty about Mr. Lloyd 
George's. It was easier to define Mr. Wilson's 
purpose when he was out of sight than Mr. Lloyd 
George's when he was in full view. 

Considerable allowance must be made for the 
Prime Minister's difficulties, even though they 
were of his own creation. Like Mr. Wilson he had 
an election just behind him. Unlike Mr. Wilson 
he had insisted on having it when it might have 
stood over. Unlike Mr. Wilson again he had 
scored a spectacular victory — though a victory 
that proved hardly less hampering at Paris than 
the American President's defeat. But for that 
election the peace negotiations might have opened 
two months earlier — and for the delay Europe 
had paid a tragic price in starvation, revolution 
and social instability. The election had done 
more than that. It had evoked speeches, from 
the Prime Minister himself and from others, that 
kept every flame of bitterness alive and roused 



56 The Peace in the Making 

lunatic hopes of an inflated indemnity,* and it 
had swamped the House of Commons with a ma- 
jority clamorous for a peace antagonistic in every 
feature to the principles of the Fourteen Points. 
That clamour could never be entirely ignored, 
and at a critical point in the negotiations with 
Eussia it played a large part in wrecking a proj- 
ect on which high hopes had justly been set. 

With these millstones round his neck Mr. Lloyd 
George was cast into the whirlpool of the Con- 
ference. All things considered his election record 
sat lighter on him than might have been expected. 
His instincts naturally carried him towards Presi- 
dent Wilson. If his hands had been free he might 
have co-operated with the President in the formu- 
lation of a treaty based scrupulously on the Four- 
teen Points. The Prime Minister is at the bot- 
tom no Imperialist, either where his own country 
or any other is concerned. A Wilson peace would 
naturally commend itself to him more than a 
Foch peace or a Sonnino peace. When he told the 
American soldiers months before that Germany 
could have peace when she wanted it on Presi- 
dent Wilson's terms he no doubt meant sincerely 
— for the moment — what he said. 

Throughout the Conference the Prime Minis- 
ter's attitude was marked by the effects of this 
play of rival forces. There were moments when 
he fought single handed for solutions dictated by 

* ' ' Mr. Lloyd George, ' ' said the Echo de Paris, ' ' won his elec- 
tion at the end of last year on a programme tersely enough 
phrased — The Kaiser to the gallows, and Germany's last sou for 
war damages- ' ' 



Some Personal Factors 57 

the spirit of pure Liberalism. I remember, for 
example, hearing him argue convincingly in dep- 
recation of wild hopes of an exaggerated indem- 
nity (hopes which no one had done more than 
himself and his political friends to kindle) and 
in defence of a just settlement of the Polish cor- 
ridor question. A commission of experts had 
discussed that question at length, and marked out 
a frontier line that involved the inclusion of near- 
ly 2,000,000 Germans in the new Polish state. Mr. 
Lloyd George set his face resolutely against such 
a solution. He got the report referred back to 
the Commission. The Commission deliberated 
afresh and decided unanimously to abide by its 
original findings. Still the Prime Minister re- 
fused to give way. The French Press attacked 
him with such vigour that he threatened to have 
the whole Conference moved to a neutral centre. 
In the end he gained his point. A new frontier 
was drawn reducing substantially the German 
element subjected to Polish rule. 

But that resolute insistence on a principle could ^ 
never be counted on in advance. There were al- 
ways powerful forces pulling in the other direc- 
tion. The attack suddenly launched by Lord 
Northcliffe at the beginning of April had its ef- 
fect. The Prime Minister hit back with charac- 
teristic vigour in a House of Commons speech, 
but no man in public life has made a more sys- 
tematic and scientific study of the uses and the 
possibilities of the Press, and it would be too 
much to expect that a sudden blast of syndicated 



58 The Peace in the Making 

hostility should leave him indifferent. How far 
that accounted for the vacillation with which the 
Prime Minister was credited at Paris is a matter 
for surmise. Again and again he would take a 
firm stand on some question of importance and 
then unexpectedly yield his whole ground. His 
relations with Mr. Bullitt, the American emissary 
to Russia, and his subsequent statement on that 
subject in the House of Commons, are now famil- 
iar. That does not stand alone. The question of 
oral negotiations with the Germans at Versailles 
is a case in point. Mr. Wilson had urged persist- 
ently that such negotiations should take place, 

A and he understood Mr. Lloyd George to be in full 
agreement with him. But at the critical moment 

\r the Prime Minister lined up with M. Clemenceau 
against the proposal and it fell to the ground. 
Another instance was the issue of the Fiume man- 
ifesto. That document was for several days un- 
der discussion. M. Clemenceau approved both its 
terms and the decision to publish it. Mr. Lloyd 
George unquestionably left in the President's 
mind the impression that he took the same view. 
But when the manifesto had been issued, and was 
being criticised, the Prime Minister took imme- 
diate steps to deny the published statement that 
the President's action had been taken with his 
concurrence. It may be, no doubt, that these and 
similar incidents sprang from a genuine misun- 
derstanding. But they were not so explained by 

Xihose in Paris best qualified to judge. 

How far the Prime Minister was guided by Mr. 



Some Personal Factors 59 

Balfour in matters falling properly within the 
Foreign Secretary's sphere can hardly be deter- 
mined. Mr. Lloyd George's closest associate was 
Mr. Philip Kerr, formerly editor of the Round 
Table, who had been one of the principal mem- 
bers of the Downing Street garden secretariat/- 
since the institution of that body in 1917^' Mf. 
Kerr's wide knowledge of affairs was undoubtedly 
of the highest value to the Prime Minister, but 
the tribute paid by Mr. Lloyd George to the For- 
eign Secretary in the House of Commons after 
the signature of the German Treaty meant more 
than mere conventional courtesy. The two Min- 
isters lived under the same roof in the Eue Nitot, 
a contiguity which gave ample opportunity for 
those informal consultations winch are often the 
most valuable of all. But it must be remembered 
that for two years the Foreign Secretary had 
been deliberately blanketed. Foreign policy was 
handled either by the Prime Minister himself or 
by the War Cabinet, of which Mr. Balfour was 
never a member. It was consequently with some- 
thing less than a Foreign Secretary's normal au- 
thority that he came to Paris, and there was little 
sign down to the signature of the German treaty 
(after which he became chief British representa- 
tive) of his having impressed himself deeply on 
the Conference. It is, however, just to remember 
that he was for some time in indifferent health — 
suffering, according to one popular diagnosis^ 
from " severe sleeping-sickness, broken about 
mealtimes by acute attacks of insomnia." 



60 The Peace in the Making 

Nothing could be more congenial to a mind of 
the subtlety and dexterity of Mr. Balfour's than 
the discussions and negotiations incidental to any 
peace conference, and testimony abounds to the 
Foreign Secretary's extraordinary capacity for 
assimilating in five minutes all the relevant facts 
on some hitherto unfamiliar subject, and armed 
with that slender equipment presenting a case that 
left would-be opponents incapable of any effective 
reply. But dialectics are one thing and convic- 
tions another. Mr. Wells asks with regard to a 
character he models on Mr. Balfour in one of his 
novels, "Did he really care? Did anything mat- 
ter to him? ' ' The same question was asked pretty 
often about Mr. Wells's prototype at Paris, and it 
never received any assured answer. The Foreign 
Secretary had his brief, and he handled it with 
consummate ability. In devising a formula or 
drafting a memorandum no one could rival him. 
But it was men who really cared that were needed 
to make the peace the world waited for. 

Such men were not lacking on the British dele- 
gation, and the influence of some of them counted 
for much behind the scenes. Notable among them 
was General Botha. The late Prime Minister of 
South Africa was seen little in public. The state 
of his health prevented him from discharging the 
mission he was asked to undertake in Poland. 
But his counsel was constantly being sought by 
his colleagues, from the Prime Minister down- 
wards, and it told consistently in favour of a peace 
based on that liberalism and range of vision that 



Some Personal Factors 61 

the history of South Africa had so impressively 
vindicated. If any proof of that were needed it 
might be found in the story told over the dead 
Premier 's grave by General Smuts, of how he had 
found written on Botha's agenda paper in the 
Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, on the day the treaty 
was signed, the words : 

God's judgments will be applied with justice 
to all peoples under the new sun, and we shall 
persevere in prayer that they may be applied 
to mankind in charity and peace and a Chris- 
tian spirit. To-day I think back May 31st, 
1902 (the date of the treaty of Vereeniging) . 

General Smuts himself made his own views 
known to the world on the day he set his signa- 
ture, with profound misgiving, to the Treaty with 
Germany. The disquiet he voiced then was no 
revelation to anyone who had been in personal 
contact with him in Paris. "You know God is 
writing a very different Treaty to this," he had 
said to one companion. "Do you think God 
doesn't see past this Treaty?" he had asked an- 
other. "What would you do if you were God 
Almighty?" he put to a third. He had done his 
utmost by personal pressure to bring about oral 
discussions with the German delegates, and the 
rigour of the final draft of the treaty caused him 
deep concern. 

The South African statesman took an active 
and prominent part in the work of the League of 
Nations Commission, and his mission to Hungary 



62 The Peace in the Making 

after the Bela Kim revolution was one of the land- 
marks of the Conference. If the advice he prof- 
fered on his return to Paris had been taken the 
difficulties of the Allies and the distresses of Hun- 
gary might have been materially diminished. 

Among the other Dominion delegates Sir Rob- 
ert Borden carried considerable weight — he took 
Mr. Balfour's place more than once in the Coun- 
cil of Foreign Ministers — and Mr. W. M. Hughes, 
in spite of the high estimate formed of his abil- 
ities by persons who watched him closely, com- 
paratively little. His hostility to the proposed 
Japanese amendment to the League Covenant on 
the subject of racial equality was the main cause 
of the unfortunate defeat of that proposal. 

There remains, among the influences that de- 
termined British policy at Paris, Lord Robert 
Cecil. Though neither a plenipotentiary nor even 
a Minister, Lord Robert made himself felt in a 
remarkable degree as Chairman of the Supreme 
Economic Council and the moving spirit on the 
League of Nations Commission. The work of 
those bodies absorbed him to the exclusion of all 
other activities, but his general attitude was well 
understood, and backed by his personality and the 
respect he commanded among delegates of all 
nations it was a factor that unquestionably in- 
fluenced decisions. Lord Robert has indicated in 
the House of Commons what features in the treaty 
he most regrets. With regard to one of them — 
the indemnity scheme as projected at one stage 



Some Personal Factors 63 

of the discussions at Paris — he made a private but 
explicit protest at the time. 

The French delegation summed itself up to 
all outward appearance in the single figure of M. 
Clemenceau. The President of the Council held 
a remarkable position in France. While his re- 
cent predecessors had passed swiftly across the 
stage and vanished from office, he had stood his 
ground against all attack for more than fifteen 
months. A defender of the capital in 1870, he 
had been the soul of the national resistance 
through the perils of 1914, and at seventy-seven, 
in spite of an assassin's attack that struck him 
down in the middle of the Conference and left 
him to carry to the grave a bullet between his 
shoulders, he yielded to no member of his own 
or any other delegation in vigour or capacity 
for work. 

As chairman of the Conference M. Clemenceau 
distinguished himself by an autocracy sufficiently 
rigorous to be effective and sufficiently benevolent 
to cause little offence. His conduct of the Plenary 
Session at which the League of Nations Covenant 
was adopted illustrated the double exercise of that 
quality to perfection. As representative of France 
on the Council of Ten, and later on the Council 
of Four, he had the reputation, particularly in the 
early weeks of the Conference, of an immovable 
stonewaller prepared to stand for the claims of 
France against all opposition. Time after time 
he was compelled by the sheer weight of the argu- 



64 The Peace in the Making 

ments against him to yield some few inches of 
ground, but by the next morning he could reg- 
ularly be counted on to be back in the old position, 
ready to contest the whole issue again from its 
genesis. 

But M. Clemenceau must be judged in the light 
of the circumstances that determined his action. 
He was there as the representative of France — a 
France which knew perfectly well what it wanted 
and relied on the President of the Council to ob- 
tain it. He was an intensely popular figure, but 
the nation was with him only so long as he stood 
for the national claims. His position in the Cham- 
ber was far from secure, and a false move at the 
Peace Conference might mean his political down- 
fall. What was more, he had an election before 
him, and though he desired no new lease of power 
for himself he owed it to his colleagues to retain 
the confidence of the electors in his administra- 
tion to the last. 

Another force the President of the Council had 
to consider was Marshal Foch. The Allied Com- 
mander-in-Chief stood frankly for a soldier's 
peace. What he cared for was material safe- 
guards, strategic frontiers, buffer states, the occu- 
pation of enemy territory. If General and Min- 
ister had been at one in their fight for the peace 
as they had been in their fight for victory in the 
war they would have made a formidable combi- 
nation. But traditionally and temperamentally 
the two men had little in common. Foch was a 
devout Catholic and a clerical in politics. Clemen- 



Some Personal Factors 65 

oeau was an agnostic and a radical. The soldier's 
peace terms were not the statesman's. Marshal 
Foch wanted an indefinite occupation of the left 
bank of the Rhine. That demand was not sus- 
tained by the French delegation. He was bitterly 
opposed to the proposal for a supreme civilian 
administration of the occupied territory. M. 
Clemenceau, as a member of the Council of Four, 
accepted that proposal without serious demur. At 
a secret Plenary Session of May 6th, the reply of 
the President of the Council to a protest by Mar- 
shal Foch at the inadequacy of the military guar- 
antees very considerably impressed the delegates 
who heard it. 

None the less, M. Clemenceau was essentially an 
apostle of the old order in international politics. 
He was well enough content with the Fourteen 
Points and the League of Nations so long as they 
were superadded to the material guarantees he 
demanded, not substituted for them. The story 
of his solemn assurance to his colleagues that 
1 ' Every night when I go to bed I raise my hands 
and say ' Georges Clemenceau, tu crois en la Ligue 
des Nations,' and every morning when I get up 
I raise my hands and recite my new creed, ' ' bears 
all the marks of authenticity on its face. But it 
was the French Premier's fundamental, not his 
formal, beliefs that determined his attitude 
throughout the negotiations. He was fighting for 
the liberation of France from the menace of a 
generation, and he claimed, in conversation with 
a group of Deputies who waited on him in May, 



66 The Peace in the Making 

that he had secured the peace that he wanted. 
Behind M. Clemenceau, moreover, there was al- 
ways the elusive figure of M. Mandel, his chef du 
cabinet. M. Mandel was understood to interest 
himself more in home than foreign affairs, and 
exactly how far he influenced his chief no one was 
prepared to estimate, but so far as he concerned 
himself with the Peace it was certainly to secure 
that it should be a French peace, not a Wilson 
peace. 

Some account must be taken of two other mem- 
bers of the French delegation, M. Stephen Pichon 
and M. Andre Tardieu. M. Pichon, as Foreign 
Secretary, took his part in pressing France's 
territorial claims, and he was one of the protagon- 
ists in the agitation for an aggressive Allied policy 
in Eussia. But in ability and influence he was 
overshadowed by M. Tardieu. A former editor 
of the Temps, M. Tardieu had acted during the 
war as special commissioner of France in the 
United States, and the political prophets marked 
him down with unanimity as a Prime Minister of 
the immediate future. He was known to the pub- 
lic during the Conference mainly as one of the 
authors (with Mr. Headlam-Morley and Dr. Has- 
kins) of the Saar Valley settlement, but his in- 
fluence, which expressed itself through various 
newspapers as well as through personal contacts, 
was pervasive. 

Of the representatives of the two other major 
nations, the Italians were the more prominent. 
Their two principal delegates down to the signa- 



Some Personal Factors 67 

ture of the German Treaty were Signor Orlando 
and Baron Sonnino, — the latter of whom claimed 
the distinction of being the only Foreign Secre- 
tary in Europe who was a baptised member of 
the Church of England. Of the two Baron Son- 
nino was by far the more forceful character. A 
confessed Imperialist, he was a constant stimulus 
in the rear of his Prime Minister. Signor Or- 
lando, a college professor himself, is tempera- 
mentally a warm admirer of President Wilson and 
his principles. But he had a thankless role to play 
at the Conference. His political position at home 
was precarious. Italy's economic situation was 
deplorable and revolution was openly talked of. 
Demobilisation was held up because the Govern- 
ment preferred to have the men under authority 
and not released to agitate. Feeling was running 
high against the Southern Slavs. Italy had count- 
ed on substantial salvage for herself out of the 
wreck of the Austrian Empire, and when all the 
most eligible territory became the property of Al- 
lies, through the recognition of the State of the 
Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, the blow to Italian 
ambitions was severe. In retiring from the Coun- 
cil of Four on the day a Southern Slav delegation 
was heard, on the ground that he could not meet 
"the enemy* ' face to face, Signor Orlando was 
faithfully voicing the antagonism of the majority 
of his countrymen. With such influences pressing 
in on him from different sides the Italian Prime 
Minister had a difficult course to shape. Something 
too must be ascribed to his southern blood, — he 



68 The Peace in the Making 

is a native of Sicily, — as for example when he re- 
quested that a meeting of the Council of Four 
which he attended after the issue of the Fiume 
manifesto might be held at Mr. Lloyd George's 
house instead of at President Wilson's, "as he 
preferred to meet on neutral territory." 

There remain the Japanese, who call for less 
extended mention. They had few direct interests 
at stake, but on those they had — Shantung, certain 
Pacific Islands, certain cables, and the declaration 
of racial equality under the League of Nations — 
they stood like granite. There was something 
almost sinister in their habitual silence. Sir Wil- 
liam Orpen, in a portrait he painted of Marquis 
Saionzi during the Conference, concentrated with 
remarkable effect the inscrutability that attached 
to them. They would sit through a discussion 
never speaking a word, faces set like masks, a 
riddle unreadable, challenging by their very ret- 
icence. What lay behind it all? What did they 
really think of the Conference? How much did 
they care for the League of Nations? How far 
did they mean business over the international 
labour charter ? No man could tell. But it is bare 
justice to give any nation credit for good inten- 
tions till it has convicted itself of bad — and 
Japan's outward deportment has in the main been 
unexceptionable, though in the matter of Korea 
and Shantung it is high time a damaged reputa- 
tion was rehabilitated. 

Two other personal influences at the Conference 
must be noted — M. Veniselos and Mr. Herbert 



Some Personal Factors 69 

Hoover. Far too little use was made of the Greek 
Prime Minister. He argued the case of his coun- 
try before the Greek Commission and the Coun- 
cil of Four with a persuasiveness that secured a 
disturbingly complete recognition of his claims, 
and he did valuable service on the League of Na- 
tions Commission. But the radically unsound sys- 
tem of valuing men by nationality instead of per- 
sonality could find no greater condemnation than 
is supplied by the fact that on neither of the two 
principal deliberative bodies, the Council of Four 
Premiers or the Council of Five Foreign Minis- 
ters, could use be found for the talents of per- 
haps the ablest statesman in Europe. 

As for Mr. Hoover, he had no place in the Con- 
ference proper at all, though the Council of Five 
had the wisdom to send him on a special mission 
to Austria and Hungary after the Rumanian seiz- 
ure of Buda-Pesth in August. For while the work 
of the Conference was deliberative and legislative 
Mr. Hoover's was purely economic. The Confer- 
ence indeed thwarted his efforts much more than 
it assisted them, by its insistence on the main- 
tenance of the blockade of Germany, a policy he 
condemned in season and out of season. But the 
Director-General of Allied Relief personified the 
one great humane influence at Paris. The fore- 
most soldiers of the world had laid in carnage the 
foundations of victory. The foremost statesmen 
of the world were spelling out their paper peace. 
He and the men he gathered round him were keep- 
ing dying children from death and lifting a corner 



70 The Peace in the Making 

at least of the cloud of misery and suffering that' 
weighed down upon Europe. In some elusive, in- 
tangible way the knowledge of the work he was 
doing shot like a purifying ray through the fog 
that enveloped the endeavours and the impotence 
of the Conference. 






Chapter VT 
NEW MAPS FOR OLD 

ONE of the chief tasks of the Conference was 
to make new maps. The face of Europe 
and Asia was to be changed. Everyone 
who was anyone wanted something different. 
France wanted Alsace-Lorraine and the Saar Val- 
ley and the left bank of the Rhine and Syria and 
part of the Cameroons; Great Britain wanted 
Mesopotamia and German East Africa and South- 
west Africa and some South Pacific Islands and 
possibly Palestine, and ought to have wanted a 
regularised title to Egypt ; Italy wanted the Tren- 
tino and Trieste and the Tyrol and Dalmatia and 
Fiume and parts of Albania and a foothold at 
Adalia; Japan wanted Shantung and some North 
Pacific Islands ; Greece wanted extensions in Epi- 
rus and Macedonia and the return of the Dode- 
canese and considerable holdings round Smyrna; 
Belgium wanted parts of German East Africa and 
various concessions at the expense of Holland; 
Poland wanted independence; so did Czecho-Slo- 
vakia and Jugo-Slavia and the border states of 
Roissia; Rumania wanted Transylvania and Bes- 
sarabia. America, grotesquely unversed in the 
enterprising diplomacy of Europe, wanted noth- 
ing at all. 

71 



Former frontiers 
af Germariy > 
New German frontiers—* 




THE NEW GERMANY. 



Daily News'Map 



72 The Peace in the Making 

Claims of that order threw into the limelight 
one definite principle — the principle of acquisi- 
tion. Quite a lot might be said for and against 
that, but at any rate it was not the principle laid 
down in President Wilson's Fourteen Points and 
his subsequent addresses. What students of those 
addresses had a right to look for when the Con- 
ference opened was a rearrangement of the map 
of the world determined by one principle above 
any other — the right of peoples to choose their 
own governors and governments. The world was 
for the first time to be, so to speak, town-planned, 
with regard to no consideration whatever but the 
soundness and justice of the plan. Imperialist 
desires and designs were irrelevant. The world 
had risen to a level above the old bad order to 
which they essentially belonged. 

Those hopes and beliefs did not survive many 
days of the Conference. The principles on which 
they rested were not banished from the Council 
chamber. President Wilson saw to that, if no 
one else did. But instead of the general and tacit 
acceptance to which they were entitled they gained 
merely a theoretical recognition, except at mo- 
ments when some delegate suddenly invoked them 
as serviceable supports to an argument based es- 
sentially on quite different and quite material 
considerations. The Conference in short was a 
battle-ground on which the new conflicted with 
the old. The contest swayed doubtfully, and each 
in turn was uppermost. On balance it can hardly 
be claimed that the victory was with the new. 



New Maps for Old 73 

But taking the territorial claims as they were, 
and varying as they did in their intrinsic justice 
and the nature of the prizes claimed, it is possible 
to disengage one or two main principles which 
affected most or all of them generally. One 
was the theory of mandates under the League 
of Nations. By that system much of the territory 
previously held by Germans or Turks was to 
form a trust, under the guardianship of one or 
other of the Allied Powers acting as agent of the 
League. The theory is more fully discussed in 
another chapter.* It is enough to say here that 
while the principle of mandate was defined in the 
Covenant of the League of Nations the vital ques- 
tion of the actual allocation of the mandates was 
never publicly discussed. The task should un- 
questionably have fallen to the League itself if the 
League had been ready to act. As it was the man- 
dates were shared out among the major Allies by 
a Council on which only those major Allies were 
represented. Belgium, it is true, is to hold part 
of what was once German East Africa under this 
tenure, but that is the result of a private arrange- 
ment with Great Britain, to whom the territory 
in question was in the first instance allotted. Al- 
together the resemblance between the old theory 
of protectorate and the new theory of mandate, 
as the latter habitually figured in the Paris dis- 
cussions, is lamentably close. It may be added 
that it is further heightened by the decision of the 
British Government to take powers to institute 

* Chapter IX. 



74 The Peace in the Making 

preferential tariff relations with, the territories 
it holds under mandate. 

A second factor of importance was the consid- 
ered policy of France in regard to the new map 
of Europe. France, as has been said, was domi- 
nated by an insistent fear of renewed German ag- 
gression. That fear was intelligible viewed in 
relation to the past, but groundless viewed in re- 
lation to the changes effected by the war. But 
there it was, and it determined the whole attitude 
of France at the Conference. She demanded two 
kinds of security. One was the transfer to her- 
self of a large part of Germany's mineral re- 
sources — the raw material of her munitions — and 
the acquisition of a strategic frontier on the Rhine. 
The other was the creation of any counterpoise 
to the power of Germany it might be possible to 
evolve in Eastern Europe. Russia was gone. The 
old alliance that had formed one side of the bal- 
ance of power in Europe had dissolved for ever, 
unless Koltchak or Denikin could achieve the un- 
expected and establish himself permanently at 
Moscow. It remained therefore to make the best 
of the smaller states. An enlarged Poland and an 
enlarged Rumania would between them stretch, 
from the Baltic to the Black Sea, capable at once 
of forming a cordon sanitaire against Russian 
Bolshevism and of commanding the respect of 
Germany sufficiently to restrain her from any ad- 
ventures in the west. For that purpose Poland 
mattered most. The more powerful Poland could 
be made the better for France. Polish, claims 



New Maps for Old 75 

should never fail for lack of French support. Po- 
lish troops were enlisted and equipped in France, 
and an Allied military officer of high rank had 
cause to comment in a private report on the activ- 
ity in Poland of French officers under whose in- 
fluence a Polish army on a scale altogether in ex- 
cess of the defensive needs of the country was 
being built up. 

There was a certain relationship between the 
policy of France and the policy of Italy. Con- 
siderable changes in Italy's frontiers were in- 
evitable. Her claim to the Italia Irredenta of the 
Trentino and part or all of the Pola peninsula 
was incontestable, though there were good rea- 
sons for preferring the solution of a free port 
at Trieste. But Italy was by no means satisfied 
with Italia Irredenta. Like France she thought in 
terms of strategy. The Austrian navy was dead. 
A Jugo-Slav navy had not been born, and unless 
the League of Nations broke down altogether it 
never would be. But that did not prevent Italy 
from claiming the mastery of the Adriatic and 
standing out for all and more than all the coast 
area allotted to her by the Treaty of London in 
1915. 

Imperialism of that order, since it could find 
no moral justification, had to seek what support 
it could in other fields. The natural arrangement 
was for Italy to favour French claims on the Rhine 
in return for French favour for Italian claims on 
the Adriatic. To be just to M. Clemenceau and 
Signor Orlando, there was no proof of any kind 



76 The Peace in the Making 

of a deal between them personally, but neither 
could be altogether unaffected by the atmosphere 
created by such assertions as this from the Matin 
(to take one example out of many) in regard to 
Italy's demands under the Treaty of London: — 
"France united to Italy by an alliance which must 
at all costs become permanent can make no oppo- 
sition to these claims. We and Italy are likely 
to find ourselves the only two Continental powers 
called on to face the dangers that are hatching 
in Central Europe — whether those dangers in the 
future take the name of Nationalism, Thirst for 
Eevenge, or Bolshevism. "We can propose nothing 
that should weaken the position of Italy." So 
much for Fourteen Point principles. 

Italy's claims, in point of fact, led to the one 
spectacular crisis of the Conference. The secret 
treaty of London, signed by Great Britain, France 
and Russia at a time when it was held that Italy's 
participation on the side of the Allies must be se- 
cured at all costs, gave the Italians the whole 
of the Dalmatian coast of the Adriatic, but not 
the town of Fiume. That was in 1915. But the 
war having been won Italy was not content even 
with what the Treaty of London gave her. Hav- 
ing secured large tracts of Jugo-Slav territory 
by the treaty in violation of the principle of self- 
determination, she proceeded with laudable busi- 
ness acumen to claim Fiume in virtue of the prin- 
ciple of self-determination. The controversy 
dominated the Conference from the first. It did 
not affect the German treaty at all, or for that 




THE NEW AUSTRIA 



'Daxly'Neyva "Map.. 



New Maps for Old 77 

matter the Austrian treaty either, since all that 
was in question was the division of spoils which 
the conquered nation would have to surrender in 
any case, no matter what their final disposition. 
But the Italians were fully alive to the fact that 
the best means of bringing pressure on the Allies 
in the matter of Fiume was by a threat to refuse 
to sign the German treaty unless their desires 
were satisfied. Hence the emergence of the ques- 
tion in the first month of the Conference. 

To and fro the battle swayed for weeks. The 
propagandists on both sides worked themselves 
to the edge of the grave. The air was thick with 
statistics. The population of Fiume was so much. 
Out of that so much was Italian. On the contrary 
so much of it was Jugo-Slav, and even the Italian- 
speaking did not want Italian rule. The French^ 
Press was captured almost solid for Italy, and 
there were plenty of fictitious or veracious stories 
to show the reason why. According to one, which 
may be taken or left as individual judgment dic- 
tates, a representative of a certain highly rep- 
utable organ called on a leading Jugo-Slav dele- 
gate. "I understand," he said, "you have been 
complaining of the attitude of my paper over 
Fiume." The plenipotentiary admitted that he 
had expressed some surprise at the journal's sud- 
den abandonment of its habitual impartiality. 
"Well," replied the other with a shrug of the 
shoulders, "you know the terms." "The 
terms?" "Yes, 125,000 francs." "Ah," replied 
the diplomatist, rising genially to the occasion, 



78 The Peace in the Making 

"est-ce que c'est un abonnement? Par semaine, 
V on par mois, ou par anfj^The Jugo-Slavs on 
their side showed equal enterprise. The Italians 
could teach them nothing in the matter of statis- 
tics. One cheering contribution to the exhibits 
in the case, circulated in the form of a picture 
post-card, was the reproduction of a memorial 
plaque set up by the grateful (and alleged Italian) 
municipality of Fiume in 1915, in honour of an in- 
trepid Austrian aviator who had brought down 
the Italian airship Citta di Ferrara in flames close 
to the town. 

So matters drifted on till late in April. Mr. 
Lloyd George and M. Clemenceau had their hands 
tied by the Treaty of London, but they were at 
least free to emphasise the folly, from Italy's own 
point of view, of the intractable attitude her rep- 
resentatives had seen fit to adopt. Col. House, 
who occupied three adjoining rooms at the Hotel 
Crillon, invited the rival delegates to meet him 
simultaneously. Each deputation was closeted 
with American experts in a room at either end of 
the suite, while Col. House, established in the mid- 
dle room, moved to and fro endeavouring to per- 
suade the antagonists to join him round a table. 
He never succeeded. 

President Wilson himself, in the language of 
his country, stood pat. He at least was not bound 
by the Treaty of London, in which America had 
no part. His view was that Italy, having accepted 
the principles of the Fourteen Points on Novem- 
ber 5th, was under a moral obligation to abandon 






New Maps for Old 79 

all claims, even under the Treaty of London, that 
conflicted with those principles. If Italy had been 
prepared to yield part of the Dalmatian coast and 
thus give Jugo-Slavia an outlet to the sea, he 
might have adopted a different attitude on Fiume. 
But he had no idea of letting the Jugo-Slavs be 
boxed in without a port. Occasionally there were 
rumours that a compromise had been effected. 
That, for example, was the conclusion to be drawn 
from a two-column heading which appeared in a 
Paris paper of April 23rd, 

ADRIATIC QUESTION SETTLED. 

Italy to Have and the Jugo-Slavs the 

Hinterland and the op , followed 

by a large blank space, and the melancholy legend, 
"One hundred and twenty lines censored.' * In 
point of fact the compromise never materialised. 

President Wilson now became the arch-enemy. 
When he went to Italy in January they burned 
candles before his portrait. In April they would 
cheerfully have burned the portrait 's original. An 
instructive anecdote drifted back to Paris of a 
fervid Italian orator who was discoursing on the 
past glories of his country. He spoke of Tasso 
(loud cheers), Dante (loud cheers) Galileo (loud 
cheers), and finally Cristoforo Colombo (dead si- 
lence broken by a few hisses) . 

In the last week of April, Mr. Wilson acted. 
Conference delays had long become a scandal and 
Italy's obduracy could be allowed to impede prog- 
ress no longer. On the Sunday of that week the 
President presented what was virtually an ulti- 



80 The Peace in the Making 

matum in the course of the discussion on the Coun- 
cil of Four. He produced a plain statement on 
the whole controversy and announced his inten- 
tion of issuing it if the difficulty was not rapidly 
resolved. Signor Orlando wept. The matter was 
dropped for that sitting, and on the Monday 
morning, Mr. Wilson, having said what he had to 
say, did not attend the council. In the afternoon, 
however, he returned, and the Council sat as eight, 
the four Foreign Ministers joining the President 
and the three Premiers. The deadlock contin- 
ued. On the Tuesday, the Four met as three, Sig- 
nor Orlando having withdrawn and announced his 
refusal to return till the Fiume question was set- 
tled in Italy's favour. He remained away all 
Tuesday. On that day M. Clemenceau remarked 
to President Wilson that there was nothing to 
be gained by holding back his manifesto longer. 
It was understood that Mr. Lloyd George took the 
same view, but he subsequently indicated that was 
not so. On Wednesday morning, Signor Orlando 
was still absent. On Wednesday afternoon, Presi- 
dent Wilson issued his statement. 

That was the breaking of the storm. The Ital- 
ians countered with an immediate declaration of 
their withdrawal from the Conference. Efforts 
were made to heal the breach, but in vain. On 
Thursday afternoon, after giving out a statement 
in reply to the President, Signor Orlando had a 
last meeting with his colleagues on the Council of 
Four at Mr. Lloyd George's house — "neutral ter- 



New Maps for Old 81 

ritory" — and the same evening he left Paris for 
Rome. 

He took with him a document of considerable 
interest which has never been published. Mr. 
Lloyd George and M. Clemenceau could not put 
their names to President Wilson's memorandum 
for obvious reasons, but they embodied their own 
views in a statement, the actual authorship of 
which was attributed to Mr. Balfour, which was 
to have been published simultaneously with or im- 
mediately after the President's manifesto. That 
course in the end was not followed. Instead, the 
document was handed to Signor Orlando, with the 
intimation that he was free to make what use of 
it he thought fit. The Italian Prime Minister ap- 
parently decided that it was little calculated to 
strengthen his case, and neither he nor anyone 
else has given any public indication of its con- 
tents. 

The crisis was viewed by the remaining Allies 
with relative equanimity. Something had to be 
done to bring the interminable discussions to an 
end, and a permanent rupture between Italy and 
the Allies was, for all her indignation, out of the 
question. Economically Italy's very existence de- 
pended on England and America. She got her 
coal and her shipping from the one and her corn 
and her credit from the other. There was no need 
for the Allies to draw attention to that funda- 
mental fact. Italy was in no danger of forget- 
ting it. 



82 The Peace in the Making 

But overheated emotions had to cool down be- 
fore the old relations could be resumed. Signor 
Orlando was able to appeal to national amour 
propre, and the more so since the Fiume agitation 
had been worked up by the Press and public 
speeches till it made of a third rate port an index 
of the rise or fall of Italy. 

The Prime Minister got a practically solid vote 
of his Parliament behind him. That was on April 
29th. On May 4th, the Three sent a formal invi- 
tation to the Italians to come back. On May 6th, 
they left Rome for Paris. What had happened 
during their absence was significant. The Coun- 
cil of Three went on with its business. The Treaty 
was virtually ready for presentation to the Ger- 
mans. Should it be held up while the Italian dif- 
ficulty was solved? The Three decided it should 
not. They decided something else of importance. 
At six-thirty one evening the official drafters re- 
ceived instructions to go through the Treaty and 
remove Italy's name wherever it occurred. The 
Covenant of the League of Nations was treated 
in the same way, Italy being transferred from the 
list of original members to the list of neutrals 
who would be asked to join immediately. At 
eight-thirty the previous instruction was can- 
celled, news having arrived that the Italians were 
coming back. 

The Treaty was to be presented to the Germans 
on Thursday, May 8th. The Italian delegates 
were to reach Paris early on Wednesday, which 
would give them time for a final discussion with 



New Maps for Old 83 

the Council of Three before a decisive step was 
taken. But on arriving at the Gare de Lyons, 
Signor Orlando was informed that the ceremony 
had been advanced by twenty-four hours and was 
fixed for that afternoon at three. He had just 
comfortable time to get lunch and a change of 
clothes before setting out for the ceremony at 
the Trianon Palace Hotel, at Versailles. Among 
other changes effected during (and as the result 
of) his absence a clause had been inserted pro- 
viding that ratification by any three of the Prin- 
cipal Allied and Alssociated Powers, in addition to 
Germany, should be sufficient to bring the treaty 
into force. 

So ended the Fiume crisis. If I seem to have 
given undue space describing its various phases 
it has to be remembered that in an account of 
the Peace Conference the measure of events is 
not their intrinsic importance, but the importance 
they assumed at Paris. And as for Fiume it was 
a continual obsession. It was with us waking 
and sleeping, eating and drinking, till President 
"Wilson took the decisive step and banished the 
disturbance from the board. Even so no settle- 
ment was reached. As I write D 'Annunzio is still 
in possession of the town, seized in his lawless 
raid, and neither Allies nor Italians show signs 
of dislodging him. 

Next in importance to the Fiume crisis was 
the Shantung crisis, which came to a head during 
the ten days the Italians were absent from Paris. 
The two controversies resembled each other in the 



84 The Peace in the Making 

fact that both sprang from secret treaties to which 
America was not a signatory, and that in each 
case the threat of withdrawal from the Confer- 
ence was used as a weapon by the recalcitrant 
party. They differed in the important fact that 
while the Allies had a powerful economic hold 
over Italy they had none whatever over Japan. 
The problem moreover had been complicated at 
the outset by a previous decision of the Confer- 
ence. Japan wanted two things at Paris. One was 
the inclusion in the League of Nations Covenant 
of a declaration of racial equality, the other the 
acknowledgment of Japan's succession to German 
rights in Shantung. Having been refused the one 
by the League of Nations Commission she was so 
much the more uncompromising in her insistence 
on the other. * 'Loss of face " is a serious matter to 
Oriental nations, and the Japanese delegates were 
not prepared to go back to their homes with the 
discredit of a double defeat upon them. It is true 
that Japan had already been accorded by her rec- 
ognition as one of the five major Powers of the 
Alliance a position such as she had never en- 
joyed in world politics, but that had by this time 
become a thing taken for granted and aroused 
no feelings of particular appreciation in Japanese 
minds. 

The facts about Shantung are simple. Japan, 
which had taken a leading part in the capture 
of the German settlement of Tsingtao, on the coast 
of Shantung, in 1914, had claimed the succession 
to all German rights in China. In 1917, Great 



New Maps for Old 85 

Britain, France, Russia and Italy had bound 
themselves by a secret agreement to support that 
claim at the Peace Conference. Not only was 
America not bound by the engagement, but Presi- 
dent "Wilson, as he told the Senate Foreign Re- 
lations Committee, was not even aware of its ex- 
istence till after the Peace Conference had be- 
gun. But there it was on record. What was 
more, China had accepted the situation in a treaty 
signed under duress in 1915, and had re-affirmed 
that acceptance in 1918. All this meant a settle- 
ment in flat defiance of the principles on which the 
armistice was signed, and China demanded that 
the Conference should declare the treaty she had 
signed in 1915 — under threat of an ultimatum — 
invalid, and transfer German rights in Shantung 
to the government at Peking, not to that of Tokio. 
The hands of Mr. Lloyd George and M. Cle- 
menceau were tied by the secret agreement of 
1917. Signor Orlando would have been in the same 
position if he had been present at the discussions. 
Mr. Wilson had to stand for the Fourteen Points 
alone. Japan made it known that if her claim was 
rejected she would leave the Conference. That 
might have been bluff. Mr. Lansing, who was not 
personally engaged in the negotiations, believed 
it was. President Wilson, who had the whole 
thing in his hands, was convinced that Japan 
meant what she said. Italy was at that moment 
an absentee, and nothing was known of her re- 
turn. Another defection might have broken up 
the Conference. More than that, it would have 



86 The Peace in the Making 

meant the emancipation of Japan from all the ob- 
ligations of the Treaty and all the restraints at- 
taching to membership of the League of Nations. 
It would have established an aggressive and em- 
bittered enemy within a day's steaming of the sea- 
board of a defenceless China. It would have dis- 
pelled finally all hope of settling by agreement 
the variety of delicate questions in which Japan 
was an interested party. What the Japanese dele- 
gates offered was to hand back to China full sov- 
ereignty over the surrendered portions of Shan- 
tung, except for a small area to be set apart as 
the site of an international settlement, retaining 
however economic rights resembling in character 
but exceeding in scale those enjoyed by other, 
powers elsewhere in China. 

Was it better to accept that offer, trusting to 
the League of Nations in the future to set wrong 
right, or to face the prospect of Japan's retiring 
altogether from the Conference! President Wil- 
son, on whom circumstances had cast an undue 
and unwelcome burden of decision, chose the for- 
mer alternative. The undertaking was not given 
in writing, but the oral pledges of Japan's rep- 
resentatives were included in the proces verbal in 
which the decisions of the Council of Four were 
at this time regularly embodied. The settlement 
aroused such hostility in China that the Chinese 
plenipotentiaries refused to sign the Peace Treaty 
at all. In America, where friendship for China 
and antagonism to Japan is traditional, the Shan- 
tung clauses of the Treaty have had to stand heav- 



New Maps for Old 87 

ier fire than any others. Three of the five Ameri- 
can delegates at Paris, Mr. Lansing, Mr. Henry- 
White and General Bliss, had sent the President 
a memorandum urging the claims of China. Presi- 
dent Wilson admitted frankly to the Senate For- 
eign Relations Committee that he liked the solu- 
tion as little as anyone, but the past having been 
prejudiced as it was this particular evil was the 
least of the variety of evils between which it was 
necessary to choose. 

France 's claims, apart from the Cameroons, on 
which there was no controversy, and Syria, the 
settlement of which dragged on inconclusively 
month after month, were concerned exclusively 
■with her Eastern frontier. She wanted Alsace- 
Lorraine, she wanted the Saar Valley, she wanted 
the left bank of the Rhine. Alsace-Lorraine fell 
to her without serious discussion. The Radicals 
of Great Britain and France urged that the trans- 
fer should be regularised by taking a plebiscite of 
the inhabitants, but it could be argued with rea- 
son that the cession was provided for in the eighth 
of the Fourteen Points,* which Germany had ac- 
cepted as the basis of peace. 

The Saar Valley and the left bank of the Rhine 
were in a different category. There could be no 
pretence that the inhabitants of either desired 
annexation by France. Various pretexts were put 
forward, but the truth was at bottom plain enough. 

*"The wrong done to France in the matter of Alsace-Lorraine, 
which has unsettled the Peace of the World for fifty years, should 
be righted." 



88 The Peace in the Making 

France wanted the Saar Valley for the sake of its 
coal (this coal rather than any other .coal on ac- 
count of its contiguity to the Lorraine ironfields) 
and the left bank of the Ehine for purposes of 
military defence. Foch and the soldiers urged 
the latter claim, the business men and Imperial- 
ists the former. In the plea that France was en- 
titled to supplies of Saar Valley coal while the 
mines injured by the Germans in her northern coal 
fields were out of action everyone concurred. It 
was quite another matter when France contended 
that that involved a change in the political status 
of the Saar Valley population. The solution final- 
ly reached represented not the ideal settlement 
but the compromise to which the advocates of an- 
nexation were forced back, after the discussion 
had swayed to and fro for a month or more at 
Paris. It embodied a fundamental injustice, — 
the political severance, even though only tempo- 
rary, of a German population from Germany. On 
the other hand the regime instituted, if not thus 
prejudiced at the outset, would have had much 
to recommend it. The Saar population, governed 
under the League of Nations by a Board of five 
commissioners, of whom one is to represent the 
inhabitants and only one can be French, and freed 
from all military service and all taxation except 
for local purposes, will have no great reason for 
discontent. At the end of fifteen years it will 
have the right to vote for return to Germany, for 
union with France, or for the perpetuation of its 
existing status. The decision that the Saar coal 



New Maps for Old 89 

shall be the absolute property of France, and 
must be bought back by the Germans if the plebi- 
scite in fifteen years' time goes in their favour, 
falls in reality under the head of indemnity and 
not of territorial resettlement. 

The left bank of the Rhine controversy centred 
largely, as has been said, round France 's demand 
for a new defensive frontier. Marshal Foch 
urged that demand insistently. President Wilson 
and Mr. Lloyd George were opposed to it so far 
as it involved annexation, and the Liberal ele- 
ments in France itself were alarmed at the pros- 
pect of creating a new Alsace-Lorraine. But the 
Liberal elements in France are not well repre- 
sented in the Paris press, and papers like the 
Echo de Paris clamoured incessantly for a mili- 
tary frontier on the Rhine. The demilitarisation 
of the left bank was generally approved, and 
France's Allies were quite ready to discuss se- 
riously the demand for a prolonged occupation as 
a guarantee of the discharge of treaty obligations. 
But Marshal Foch fought to the death for his 
proposals, and at the critical moment Lord North- 
cliffe threw in his battalions on the side of mili- 
tarist imperialism, publishing in the Daily Mail 
a full-dress interview with the Commander-in- 
Chief, in which the whole array of arguments for 
the repudiation of the principle of self-determina- 
tion in the interests of the defence of France were 
staged with characteristic skill. The interview, 
curiously enough, was not printed in the Paris 
Daily Mail or any other French paper, owing to 



90 The Peace in the Making 

restrictions, dating back to the Boulanger episode, 
on the publication of the views of serving officers. 
Various references to the interview were attempt- 
ed but in every case they were rigorously cen- 
sored. 

The contest on the Council of Four was warmer, 
and the same time sooner over, than was generally 
realised. To dispassionate observers indeed the 
French position seemed so untenable that it was 
difficult to suppose it would be seriously consid- 
ered. But Marshal Foch put in memorandum 
after memorandum, and so severe did the tension 
become that President "Wilson and Mr. Lloyd 
George were constrained to agree to a compro- 
mise which the former at least must have found 
distasteful in the extreme. The proper defence of 
France was the League of Nations. But France 
was not content to trust to the League, and point- 
ed out with some justice that the League was not 
yet in being. To meet her objections Great 
Britain and America agreed to accept forthwith 
in regard to France the obligations that would 
fall on them as members of the League when the 
League actually came into operation. That offer 
was made on March 14th, the day of President 
Wilson's return to Paris after his flying visit to 
America. It was accepted by France as the price 
of the abandonment of the Foch proposals, and on 
the day of the presentation of the Treaty to the 
Germans it was announced that President Wilson 
and Mr. Lloyd George had pledged themselves to 
propose to the American Senate and the British 



New Maps for Old 91 

Parliament respectively "an engagement subject 
to the League of Nations to go immediately to the 
assistance of France in the case of an unpro- 
voked attack by Germany. ' ' In spite of the sav- 
ing clause "subject to the League of Nations'* 
the agreement is inevitably damaging to the pres- 
tige of the League, and its inherent dangers were 
illustrated by the demand immediately voiced in 
various quarters in France that both Italy and 
Belgium should be brought into the new alliance. 
So hard does the Balance of Power doctrine die. 
There was still one more contest to come over 
the Rhine territory. Under the Treaty the Allies 
took power to occupy the left bank of the river 
for fifteen years as guarantee of the payment of 
the indemnity, and to extend that period at will 
in the event of Germany's failure to discharge 
her obligations. The question of the administra- 
tion of that area during occupation had to be set- 
tled. Marshal Foch stood out for a fully devel- 
oped military regime, and a singularly uncompro- 
mising French memorandum was drawn up in de- 
fence of that thesis. General Tasker Bliss, the 
military member of the American Peace Delega- 
tion, who had just returned to Paris from the 
Rhine, immediately replied with an equally strong 
memorandum urging the establishment of a su- 
preme civil control. This broadly represented the 
British view also. The question was referred to 
a committee, on which Lord Robert Cecil was the 
British member and Mr. J. W. Davis, the Ameri- 
can Ambassador in London, represented the 



92 The Peace in the Making 

United States. Marshal Foch stated his case in 
person, but the committee reported against him 
and the Council of Four adopted its recommenda- 
tions, which provided for the administration of 
the occupied area by a Supreme Rhineland Com- 
mission of five civilian members, with whom final 
executive authority would rest. That solution 
was naturally not popular in French military cir- 
cles and there was more than a suspicion that Dr. 
Dorten's attempt to form a semi-independent 
Ehineland Republic a month or so later had the 
unofficial backing of various French officers as 
well as of various French clericals. 

To the list of territorial controversies of the 
first order must be added the question of the 
boundaries of Poland, to which reference has 
already been made. That problem produced a 
slight change of orientation among members of 
the Council of Four. As a rule where German 
interests were concerned M. Clemenceau might 
be described as standing well to the right, Presi- 
dent Wilson well to the left, and Mr. Lloyd George 
somewhere between the two. On Poland the re- 
lationships shifted. France's interest in that 
country has already been indicated. Mr. Wilson 
too had his reasons for sympathy with the Poles. 
There is a large Polish population in the United 
States, and one of the Fourteen Points was de- 
voted exclusively to the vindication of Poland's 
claims. He appeared quite content to accept the 
report of the Polish Commission, so delimiting 
the " corridor" to Dantzig as to include two mil- 



New Maps for Old 93 

lion Germans in Poland, as well as cutting off 
East Prussia from geographical connection with 
Germany altogether. It was Mr. Lloyd George 
who fought that battle and won it. No ideal so- 
lution was possible. The severance of East Prus- 
sia was the inevitable result of the connection of 
Poland with the sea. All that could be done — 
and that was done — was to secure for Germany 
free transit rights over the strip of Polish ter- 
ritory that separated West Prussia from East. 
Round Dantzig a fierce controversy centred. 
Should the predestined port of Poland remain 
German? Should a town 95 per cent. German 
be handed over to Poles? Statistics hurtled 
through the air. The Poles were on the spot to 
state their case in person, the Germans, of course, 
were not, but there were plenty of devotees of 
self-determination to challenge the Polish argu- 
ments. In the end Mr. Lloyd George got his way 
over the corridor, and Dantzig was made nomi- 
nally a free city, though that concession was 
hedged about with so many qualifications as to 
be hardly worth the breath expended in arguing 
for it. 

All round the Polish frontier there was con- 
troversy, as to Lithuania, as to the Ukraine, as to 
the notorious Teschen, where coal mines and a 
railway were in dispute. The Teschen discus- 
sions trailed on till the middle of September, when 
it was decided to cut the knot by ordering a plebi- 
scite of the inhabitants. Polish and Czecho-Slo- 
vak propagandists had argued their claims 



94 The Peace in the Making 

threadbare for six months, and armed affrays be- 
tween soldiers of the two nations in Teschen itself 
had been numerous. A plebiscite was also de- 
cided on in Upper Silesia, largely on the initiative 
of Mr. Lloyd George, who insisted that the Polish 
claims to that area should be submitted to the 
decision of the inhabitants. 

The minor changes in the map are too numer- 
ous to trace, but there was one to which a pe- 
culiar, if adventitious, interest attached. There 
was no more striking figure in Paris at a certain 
stage of the Conference than the Emir Feisal, son 
of the King of the Hedjaz. I picture him as I saw 
him one afternoon pacing up and down the great 
lounge of the Hotel Majestic in company with 
his inseparable attache, Col. Lawrence, the re- 
markable young Oxford don, who, turning to ac- 
count the knowledge of Arabic he had acquired in 
exploring for manuscripts, had succeeded in 
bringing the ruler of the Hedjaz and all the troops 
he controlled into the war on the British side 
against the Turks. Col. Lawrence is a few years 
over thirty and looks less. He stands about five 
feet six. The Emir Feisal must be a good six 
inches taller and his remarkable golden head- 
dress, crowning a figure already made notable by 
the rich black beard and the flowing robe, height- 
ened still further the contrast between the two 1 
companions. "What the Emir wanted at Paris 
was the recognition of the Hedjaz. He got it, 
and signed the Treaty at Versailles as the repre- 
sentative of an independent monarch. That had 



New Maps for Old 95 

already been conceded by a secret agreement of 
1916, between Great Britain, Russia and France, 
which gave Great Britain Mesopotamia and 
France Syria. As to Mesopotamia no question 
arose, but the disposition of Syria was the sub- 
ject of endless discussion at the Conference. It 
was alleged that the inhabitants did not desire the 
establishment of a French regime. The despatch 
of a commission of enquiry was decided on, then 
cancelled, then revived, then cancelled again, till 
no one knew at any moment whether the latest 
resolve was that it should go or not go. In the 
end the appointed British representatives, Sir 
Henry Macmahon and Dr. D. G. Hogarth, aban- 
doned their proposed journey. The French rep- 
resentatives were never appointed and the Amer- 
icans, Mr. Charles B. Crane and President King, 
of Oberlin University, went out alone. The as- 
signation of the Syrian mandate to France was 
finally agreed to after consultation with Lord 
Allenby after his return from Palestine and 
Egypt in September. 

The future of Asia Minor, where Greece and 
Italy had taken the precaution of pegging out 
their claims by the landing of troops at Smyrna 
and Adalia respectively, was left in abeyance 
pending the decision of America as to the accept- 
ance of a mandate for the whole or any part of 
that section of the former Turkish Empire. 

By the end of it all settled frontiers, which 
the League of Nations undertakes by Article X. 
of the Covenant to defend against external ag- 



g6 The Peace in the Making 

gression, and by Article XI. to alter as changing 
conditions may require, got marked out by the 
Council of Four, or its successor. The peace of 
the world in the future may depend very largely 
on the relative importance the League attaches to 
the two articles in question. All things in the 
f affairs of men develop and change. The predom- 
inance of X., the static, means war. The predom- 
inance of XI., the elastic, means justice and peace. 



Chapter VII 
THE BILL FOR DAMAGES 

THE indemnity question was in some respects 
the storm-centre of the Conference. It was 
not astonishing that it should be. The war 
had brought impoverishment on an unprecedented 
scale on every country, with the possible exception 
of America and Japan, that had taken part in it, 
and every nation, again with the possible excep- 
tion of America and Japan, was animated in vary- 
ing degree by a desire to recoup itself at Ger- 
many's expense for some portion of its losses, 
and to penalise Germany by the imposition of a 
drastic indemnity for the ruin she had brought 
upon the world. 

That attitude was intelligible enough. Logi- 
cally there was no answer to the demand that the 
guilty author of the war — and no one at Paris was 
disposed to acquit Germany of any share of the 
full responsibility for what had happened — should 
contribute, to the utmost limit of her ability, to 
the reinstatement of the countries whom the war 
had driven far towards bankruptcy. The man of 
average common-sense saw only one term set to 
the demands of the Allies on Germany, that im- 
posed by the fact that unless she were left some 
margin of subsistence it would be impossible for 

97 



98 The Peace in the Making 

her to restore her industries and make her con- 
tribution, whether in the form of indemnity or 
through the normal channels of trade, to the com- 
mon wealth of the world. Perhaps it is putting it 
too high to say that men of average common- 
sense saw that, for the number who expounded 
that self-evident doctrine with any constancy was 
conspicuously scanty. Still smaller was the hand- 
ful liberal-minded and far-seeing enough to set 
reconciliation and the restoration of true peace 
higher than the exaction of the uttermost meas- 
ure of reparation. 

The popular demand, though in its common 
form it was a demand for the impossible, was 
intelligible in France if it was intelligible any- 
where. For one thing, France needed the indem- 
nity as hardly any other nation needed it. She 
had neglected culpably to increase her revenue, 
as it should have been increased, by taxation, 
staking everything on the hope of liquidating her 
burden of debt out of payments by Germany. 
That was the practical side of the question. The 
psychological counted on the whole for even more. 
France had suffered from the war as no other of 
the major Allies had. Her borders had been in- 
vaded, her richest provinces had been ravaged, 
her capital had been under daily fire from long- 
distance guns as well under nightly attack from 
Gothas. It was little wonder that France should 
come to the court of judgment hot with anger and 
the zeal for retribution. Germany, moreover, had 
aggravated her offences by every embitterment, 



The Bill for Damages 99 

in small matters as well as great, that a primi- 
tive and uncomprehending psychology could de- 
vise. She not only committed crimes but adver 7 
tised them. One instance given me by Mr. Hoover 
will serve as example. In the occupied regions 
of Belgium and Northern France there were lo- 
calised two celebrated strains of horses. They 
had become naturalised in ,these two districts 
and the stock of the whole world was replenished 
from there. When the Germans got possession 
of the districts in question they carried off every 
horse into Germany, ' ' and, ' ' said Mr. Hoover, ' ' I 
have in my drawer an advertisement notifying 
all and sundry that the whole stock of both breeds 
is now held in Germany and anyone desiring to 
replenish his stud should apply to such and such 
an address." That is merely a chance illustration 
in regard to a small matter of the working of the 
German mind in great matters. The gutting of 
the factories at Lille and elsewhere, and the de- 
liberate destruction of blast furnaces even in the 
last month of German occupation, were other ex- 
amples of a criminality that made the temper of 
France what it was. 

The attitude of Great Britain was different. 
Apart from air-raids and an occasional naval 
dash across the North Sea the war had left the 
soil of England immune. There was no such 
stimulus as in France to a demand for retribution. 
But the British representatives came to the Peace 
Conference fresh from a General Election in 
which the cry of "Germany Must Pay" had 



ioo The Peace in the Making 

turned the votes of some millions of electors who 
knew as much about Germany's capacity to pay 
as they knew about the properties of helium. In 
his Bristol speech in December, Mr. Lloyd George 
had declared that "we have an absolute right 
to demand the whole cost of the war from Ger- 
many," and that "we propose to demand the 
whole cost of the war," and had mentioned 
£24,000,000,000 as a reasonable total for the claim. 
Other speakers preached from the same text with- 
out even the reservations with which the Prime 
Minister fortified himself. He did indeed reg- 
ularly invoke the saving formula "up to the full 
limit of Germany's capacity to pay," — a quali- 
fication amounting to the unimpeachable truism 
that you could not take from Germany what Ger- 
many had not got. 

That policy had been far too often and too 
loudly proclaimed to be jettisoned out of hand 
as soon as the subject was approached in earnest 
at Paris. The Prime Minister was indeed at con- 
siderable pains to damp down the expectations his 
own utterances had excited, but it was not till 
comparatively late in the Conference that that 
basis of settlement was frankly abandoned. In 
the House of Commons questions on the subject 
were persistent, and the Government spokesmen 
made zealous endeavours to provide replies to 
suit every taste. Mr. Bonar Law's declaration of 
February 13th, for example, to the effect that "the 
British delegates on the Commission (on Repa- 



The Bill for Damages 101 

ration) are definitely instructed to claim an in- 
demnity which will include the cost of the war 
as well as damage actually inflicted," may be 
profitably compared with Mr. Bonar Law's decla- 
ration of March 17th that "our policy is not and 
never has been to demand from Germany what 
we know under any circumstances Germany can- 
not pay. ' ' 

It remains to add a word on America. The 
United States Government had nothing to claim 
from Germany. Whatever damage America had 
sustained by sunk ships and the like had been 
more than set off by her seizures of German prop- 
erty on the declaration of war between the two 
countries. In any case a different spirit on the 
indemnity question prevailed among the Ameri- 
can delegates at Paris from that animating most 
of the British and French, and American influ- 
ence was consistently directed towards modify- 
ing the rigour and the impracticability of the 
financial terms of the Treaty. 

Theoretically the solution of the indemnity 
problem should have been relatively simple. The 
Fourteen Points, on the basis of which the Allies 
had undertaken to make peace, spoke of the " res- 
toration" of the occupied territories, and in the 
vital Note of November 5th, a specific interpreta- 
tion of what the Allies understood by restoration 
was conveyed to the Germans. The passage in the 
Allied memorandum bearing on this point was as 
follows : — i 



102 The Peace in the Making 

"In the conditions of peace laid down in his 
Address to Congress of January 8th, 1918, the 
President declared that the invaded territo- 
ries mast be restored as well as evacuated and 
freed, and the Allied Governments feel that no 
doubt ought to be allowed to exist as to what 
this provision implies. 

"By it they understand that compensation 
will be made by Germany for all damage done 
to the civilian population of the Allies and their 
property by the aggression of»Germany by land, 
by sea and from the air." 

That definition was made gratuitously by the 
Allies. They need not have made it. They might 
have chosen some more comprehensive formula. 
But in point of fact they chose this formula, and 
having chosen it they were in the opinion of most 
honourable men under some obligation to abide 
by it. 

The Allies in Council at Paris declined, how- 
ever, to consider themselves bound at all. Promi- 
nent English and French politicians had declared 
that Germany was liable for the whole cost of the 
war, and that they were out to get all they could ; 
and it was with those declarations fresh in mem- 
ory that the negotiations at Paris opened. In ac- 
tual fact the whole question was largely academic. 
If payments falling within the four corners of 
the November 5th definition are regarded for the 
sake of distinction as reparation, and those fall- 
ing outside them as indemnity, it was certain that 



The Bill for Damages 103 

when reparation had been paid, if it could be paid, 
there was no possible hope of getting a penny 
beyond that to rank as indemnity. 

In other words, the Allies in adopting the atti- 
tude they did adopt at Paris had not even the hope 
of tangible gain as a reward for their cynical dis- 
regard of their November pledge. There was no 
question of how that pledge was meant to be in- 
terpreted. I satisfied myself of that by discuss- 
ing the matter with the delegate primarily respon- 
sible for framing the pledge in the first instance. 
It was intended to mean exactly what it appeared 
to mean. And when the Allies announced their 
intention of including in the demand on Germany 
the cost of war pensions and allowances they were 
in effect tearing up a document to which they had 
formally set their signature not six months be- 
fore. Why the Americans, who declined to bene- 
fit by the demand, or to draw a penny in respect 
to it, consented to associate themselves with the 
new definition I have never understood. Appar- 
ently they felt it necessary in this as so many 
other cases to keep in line with the rest of the Al- 
lies, even at some expense of principle. 

The reason why Great Britain and France in- 
sisted on the pensions is obvious enough. The 
populace of both countries had been buoyed up 
by the promise of extravagant indemnities, and 
the demand had to bear some sort of resemblance 
to the expectations aroused. It was understood 
that pressure for the inclusion of war pensions 
emanated in the first instance from the British. 



104 The Peace in the Making 

Delegation, since without that addition the sum 
falling due to Great Britain, whose claims would 
thus be confined to reparation for air raid and 
submarine damage, would have been so relatively 
inconsiderable that the contrast between the fig- 
ures at which they would stand and the figures 
bandied about on pre-election platforms would 
have dealt political devastation in the ranks of the 
Coalition Government. In France much the same 
influences operated. If hopes had to be disap- 
pointed they must be disappointed gradually. 
Consequently disillusionment was only allowed to 
spread slowly, keeping pace with the endeavours 
of politicians of both countries to break gently 
to their public as a whole facts that to every stu- 
dent of the elements of finance had been common- 
places long before the armistice of November. 
^f For Mr. Lloyd George and his colleagues of the 
^ British Delegation the crisis came early in April, 
j~* when a House of Commons group and Lord 

^O^ Northcliff e 's papers combined in a common at- 
1 <^«,v» tack on the Prime Minister, bearing primarily on 
his promises and his performance in the matter 
of indemnity. Lord Northcliffe himself, who had 
for some weeks been staying in the South of 
France, moved North at this juncture and estab- 
lished himself at Fontainebleau, some forty miles 
from Paris, where on a certain Sunday he held 
conclave with the principal members of the Paris 
staffs of the Times and Daily Mail. The editor 
of the Times, as has been already stated, had 
his temporary headquarters at Paris, and was 



The Bill for Damages 105 

regularly writing the leading article in the Paris 
edition of the Daily Mail. In both papers fierce 
assaults on the Prime Minister appeared daily. 
They became pro-French as they became anti- 
George. The Prime Minister was compared, by 
implication or explicitly, with M. Clemenceau, 
very much to the advantage of the latter. Other 
harbingers of storm, like Mr. Leo Maxse and Miss 
Christabel Pankhurst, appeared suddenly in Paris, 
the latter to proclaim (in an interview in the Daily 
Mail) on behalf of what was comprehensively 
termed "the women of England" their expecta-/ 
tions in the matter of indemnity. 

As climax came the famous telegram from some > ^ 
three hundred members of the House of Com- 
mons, who, dissatisfied and suspicious at the re- 
plies they received from the Treasury Bench, 
wired in concert to the Prime Minister at Paris 
that 

"our constituents have always expected and 
still expect that the first action of the Peace 
Delegates would be, as you repeatedly stated in 
your election speeches, to present the Bill in 
full, and make Germany acknowledge the debt, 
and to discuss ways and means of effecting pay- 
ment.' ' 

The combination of forces had by now driven V 
the Prime Minister into a position where he was 
compelled to give battle. He knew, moreover — 
or so his entourage at Paris asserted — more about 
the M.P. 'a. telegram than met the eye. That docu- 



io6 The Peace in the Making 

ment, it was alleged, was conceived not in the 
House of Commons at all, but no further from 
Paris than Fontainebleau, where the author and 
director of the Press campaign held his court and 
\developed his strategy. The sequel is still fresh 
in memory. Mr. Bonar Law flew over to Paris to 
consult with his chief. Mr. Lloyd George replied 
to his critics in a challenging message declaring 
that 

"my colleagues and I mean to stand faithfully 
by all the pledges which we gave to the con- 
stituencies. We are prepared at any moment 
to submit to the judgment of Parliament, and 
if necessary of the country, our efforts loyally 
to redeem our promises. " 

A! few days later the Prime Minister returned 
to England and in the House of Commons deliv- 
ered himself of a vigorous denunciation of Lord 
Northcliffe, his aims and his methods. 

On the whole the incident did something to clear 
the air. In one sense Mr. Lloyd George was on 
safe enough ground. Loyally as he might attempt 
to fulfil his promises it was altogether beyond his 
powers to fulfil them in the sense in which the 
ordinary man had understood them. You could 
not get out of Germany what Germany had not 
got. The moment the problem of the German 
indemnity was faced in earnest the inflated hopes 
of vast payments in money or in kind faded away. 
Whether the Germany of November, 1918, could 
have made good the damage done was more than 



The Bill for Damages 107 

doubtful. For the Germany of June, 1919, it was 
practically out of the question. For by June-, 
1919, Germany had lost Alsace-Lorraine with its 
steel and its textile industries, she had lost Posen 
and its agricultural wealth, she had the prospect 
of losing Upper Silesia and its coal, she was 
stripped of practically the whole of her commer- 
cial fleet. To expect huge indemnities from a na- 
tion thus crippled was to expect the physically im- 
possible. 

The dilemma that faced the Allies lay in the fact 
that before Germany could pay she must pro- 
duce, to produce she must have raw materials, and 
to get raw materials she must have long credits 
or a loan, which no one but the Allies could pro- 
vide. That was the truth which impressed itself 
in the end even on Mr. W. M. Hughes, who was 
zealous beyond any delegate in Paris in devising 
means of extracting from Germany what could 
not be extracted. He discussed the matter on 
one occasion with a high financial expert. Was 
there no way, he pressed, of putting Germany in 
a position to pay? "Only one," replied the ex- 
pert blandly; "give her a preference in Allied 
markets." 

This way and that the discussions swayed. Ger- 
many could pay only in gold or securities, com- 
modities or services. Her gold reserves and se- 
curities had dwindled by the end of the war to 
next to nothing, and what gold she had was ear- 
marked for payment for the food the Allies were 
sending in. Services could not be rendered, for 



io8 The Peace in the Making 

the Allies had seized the ships they might have 
been rendered with. If commodities were poured 
into Allied or neutral markets as indemnity pay- 
ments they would have the inevitable effect of 
driving Allied, manufacturers out of business. As 
a common-sense diplomatist remarked to a par- 
ticularly Teutophobe colleague, "You have got 
to recognise that you can't have both your money 
and your revenge.' ' You cannot, in other words, 
both starve and boycott Germany and at the same 
time get indemnity payments out of her. Some- 
thing, it was true, could be extracted in the form 
of coal and other natural products, but here too 
unforeseen complications arose. Germany had 
lost nearly a third of her coal through the trans- 
fer of territory, and it was necessary in any case 
to leave her enough to keep her industries in op- 
eration. Other difficulties cropped up in the case 
of potash, a commodity from which everyone was 
hoping everything. There were large potash de- 
posits in Germany. Let the Allies levy toll on 
them. Something, in point of fact, was done in 
that direction, but potash is an article for which 
the demand is strictly limited. In 1913, the last 
pre-war year, for example, Great Britain import- 
ed potash from all sources to the value of less 
than £1,400,000 — not a very considerable stage on 
the road towards £24,000,000,000. Moreover, when 
the Allies began accepting potash in payment for 
food supplies there was an immediate and vigor- 
ous outcry from France, who protested that the 



The Bill for Damages 109 

arrangement was ruining the market for her new- 
ly-acquired potash in Alsace-Lorraine. 

The Commission that grappled with the indem- 
nity problem consisted, for Great Britain, of Lord 
Sumner, a Law Lord, and Lord Cunliffe, the Gov- 
ernor of the Bank of England, with Mr. J. M. 
Keynes and other Treasury officials, while the 
principal American members were Mr. Thomas 
W. Lamont, a member of the firm of J. P. Morgan, 
and Mr. Norman Davis. The principal French 
member was the Minister of Finance, M. Klotz. 
Various sub-commissions were formed, Mr. W. M. 
Hughes being chairman of that on guarantees for 
payment, a question which proved baffling enough 
to prevent the sub-commission from reporting in 
time to be of any use. 

From the first, two distinct schools of opinion 
revealed themselves. Should Germany's capacity 
to pay be ascertained, the bill drawn on that basis 
and payment rigorously exacted ? Or should a bill 
for the full estimated damage be presented and 
as much of it got out of Germany as could be ex- 
tracted? To each course there were obvious ob- 
jections, quite apart from the question of whether 
the total bill was to represent the full cost of the 
war or demands based on the agreed formula of 
November 5th. The French papers, most of them 
well supplied with ulterior inspiration, were free 
from all uncertainty on the matter, dwelling 
ceaselessly on the financial needs of France and 
the justice of meeting them in full at the expense 



1 10 The Peace in the Making 

of Germany. But even their indomitable perti- 
nacity had to yield before the hard facts of the 
situation. 

By the beginning of April, something like agree- 
ment had been reached. The November formula, 
expanded by the inclusion of war pensions, was 
approved, and the principle of investigating the 
extent of the actual damage done and demanding 
compensation to cover it accepted. M. Clemen- 
ceau, receiving a deputation of Badical-Socialist 
deputies on April 15th, was able to declare that 
"the question of reparations has been settled 
between the Allies on the basis which your party 
regards as indispensable for France," an asser- 
tion a little qualified by the accompanying expla- 
nation that the basis of settlement was simply 
the payment of war pensions, and complete repa- 
ration for all personal and material damage. 

The treaty actually presented to the Germans 
on May 7th contained terms embodying a com- 
promise between the "whole-cost-of-the-war" 
school and the "November-formula" school. Ger- 
many was called on formally to accept the respon- 
sibility of herself and her Allies "for causing 
all the loss and damage to which the Allied and 
Associated Governments and their nationals have 
been subjected as a consequence of the war im- 
posed on them by the aggression of Germany and 
her Allies." She had even to make the same ad- 
mission in relation to Eussia. "While it was rec- 
ognised that to make restitution on that scale 
would be altogether beyond her power she was 



The Bill for Damages ill 

definitely required to pay compensation for dam- 
age falling under the November formula, together 
with war pensions and allowances (on the scale 
prevailing in the French Army), damage caused 
by maltreatment of prisoners, damage to prop- 
erty other than naval and military material, dam- 
age done to civilians through forced labour, and 
damages represented by fines or levies imposed 
in occupied territory. Towards the discharge of 
this liability £1,000,000,000 was to be paid within 
two«years, and by thai; date a schedule of future 
payments extending over thirty years was to be 
framed by an Inter- Allied Commission on which 
Germany would have no representative. 

Those provisions, which promised to leave Ger- 
many financially helpless for a generation, and to 
perpetuate the occupation of part of her territory 
(as a guarantee of payment) for the whole of that 
time, as well as giving the Reparation Commis- 
sion powers of inquisitorial investigation into the 
whole of Germany's internal economy, were im- 
mediately challenged by the German delegation at 
Versailles. 

Count BrockdorfT-Rantzau wrote M. Clemen- 
ceau a vigorous and striking letter * in which he 
represented with convincing force the condition 
of Germany as the Peace Treaty would leave her. 
Her loss in raw materials like steel, zinc and coal, 
and the transfer to adjacent nations of agricul- 
tural districts that provided more than 20 per 
cent, of her cereals and potatoes, would, he point- 

* See Appendix III., p. 217. 



112 The Peace in the Making 

ed out, mean that millions of her inhabitants 
would be deprived of the means of subsistence. 
What capacity could a population so strained have 
for paying huge indemnities? 

The force of such arguments was admitted by 
members of the Reparation Commission, both 
British and American, and many delegates not di- 
rectly concerned with the financial settlement ex- 
erted strong influence in favour of a mitigation 
of the terms. In the six weeks that intervened 
before a new version of the Treaty, revised in the 
light of the German submissions, was presented, 
the whole matter was re-opened. The question 
whether a demand expressed in specific figures 
should be presented, or compensation under cer- 
tain categories — the total being left for subse- 
quent computation — be insisted on was vigorously 
contested. No agreement could be reached on a 
specific total. At one moment £12,000,000,000 was 
the sum mentioned. At another a prominent 
member of the Commission had a kind of super- 
natural prompting that pointed to £8,000,000,000. 
Moderate people were content to look for £5,- 
000,000,000. Such a divergence pointed clearly 
to the omission of specific figures, but the result of 
that would be, as the Germans protested with feel- 
ing, that Germany would never know what her 
responsibility was. Year by year, the Eeparation 
Commission would be combing her over and re- 
lieving her of every pfennig she had made in the 
year. There would never be a balance left in hand 
to finance industry. No one in Germany would 



The Bill for Damages 113 

have any incentive to produce if it was ordained 
that no part of the fruit of production, beyond 
what was needed for bare subsistence, would be 
left in German hands. 

Such arguments, plainly stated, had a visible 
effect. There was indeed a very real prospect 
that rather than commit herself to liabilities she 
had no hope of discharging Germany would re- 
fuse to sign the Treaty at all, in which case the 
relapse of the Central Empires into chaos, and 
probably into Bolshevism, was inevitable. As it 
was the AHlies did modify their demands in cer- 
tain material particulars. The Germans had pro- 
posed that their full liability should be fixed at 
a total of £5,000,000,000. That, however, turned 
out on examination to be an unreal offer, for it 
was proposed to pay no interest on the debt, to 
extend the instalments over fifty years, and to 
include in the total all kinds of payments {e.g., 
for food and the maintenance of the armies of oc- 
cupation) which fell properly outside the repa- 
ration category altogether. 

The Allies' new proposal was that the estimate 
of the total payable and the method of payment 
should be made not independently of Germany 
but with her close co-operation, a German com- 
mission being constituted to work with the Allied 
Reparation Commission and submit proposals to 
it. It would be open to these commissions between 
them, having surveyed the actual damage and 
computed the probable cost of making it good, to 
fix a lump sum in settlement of the whole or part 



114 The Peace in the Making 

of Germany's liability, thus freeing her from the 
dreaded menace of undefined annual exactions. 
The demand for a first payment of £1,000,000,000 
by May, 1921, remained unaltered. 

Such were the provisions of the Treaty as Ger- 
many signed it. Some conditions were laid down 
as to the form in which payment should be made, 
the surrender of merchant vessels, annual con- 
tributions of coal to France, Italy and Belgium, 
the assignment of dye-stuffs to the Allies gener- 
ally, all representing part-payment in kind. As 
a whole the terms were crushingly severe — in the 
opinion of many British and American delegates 
far too severe. So far as the demands travelled 
outside the November formula that criticism is 
unanswerable. To have exacted what was pro- 
vided for under that formula would in itself have 
laid on Germany an almost insupportable burden, 
but it would in that case have been a burden im- 
posed in strict justice and representing a rigor- 
ously equitable requital for the methods to which 
Germany had chosen to resort. As it was it was 
left open to Germany to charge the Allies with 
a grave breach of faith. 

One virtue in the formula adopted was that the 
system of investigation agreed on would provide 
for a just apportionment of damages as between 
the several Allies, as well as for a fair computa- 
tion of Germany's total liability. That was a mat- 
ter of some importance, for there had been no se- 
cret about the discontent of France and Belgium 
in particular with the attitude of other Allies 






The Bill for Damages 115 

whose national losses had been far less. Again 
and again it was urged that Great Britain (Amer- 
ica was hardly involved at all) should in a spirit 
of self-abnegation forgo her claims till the two 
devastated countries had been set on their feet. 
In any case the Anglo-Saxon countries would have 
to furnish loans for this purpose, but a spontane- 
ous act of generosity in connection with the in- 
demnity would have stirred emotions calculated to 
smooth out every subsequent difficulty that arose. 
But no such offer was made. Finally Belgium, 
fired by the example of Italy and Japan at the 
time of the Fiume and Shantung episodes, talked 
openly, though hardly with serious intent, of with- 
drawing her representatives from the Conference. 
Ultimately the Allies consented under pressure 
to do what they might have done with the grace 
of spontaneity weeks earlier, and guarantee Bel- 
gium prior rights over the indemnity receipts up 
to a total of £100,000,000. But to the end Great 
Britain made no hint of subordinating her claims 
to the far more urgent necessity of France. 



Chapter VIII 
LENIN AND BELA KUN 

THE greatest unsolved problem before the 
Conference was Russia. The old monarch- 
ist Russia that went into the war as the ally 
of France and Great Britain had vanished for 
ever. The March revolution of 1917, and the suc- 
cession of Kerensky to power had brought a new 
Russia to birth. It was a Russia the Allies proved 
themselves incompetent to handle, and it gave 
place in November of the same year to a Bol- 
shevist Russia, under the leadership of Lenin and 
Trotsky. 

The Bolshevists, it was universally agreed, 
could not last for six weeks. It was doubtful 
whether the first week of 1918 would see them in 
power. They had snatched a sudden advantage 
and would go as swiftly as they came. So the 
prophets of every Allied country, both the proph- 
ets who sympathised and the prophets who con- 
demned. Yet the assembling of the Peace Con- 
ference delegates in January, 1919, found Lenin 
still in power, and to all appearance well estab- 
lished. The affairs of Russia were inextricably 
complicated. The Bolshevists, holding Petrograd 
and Moscow and the greater part of European 

u6 



Lenin and Bela Kun 117 

Russia, were encompassed on all sides by a circle 
of enemies. The British forces at Archangel were 
upholding a precarious local government under 
Nicholas Tchaikovsky; there was another British 
force at Murmansk; the Finns, the Esthonians, 
the Lithuanians, the Poles, were all operating with 
more zeal or less against Lenin. Petlura in the 
Ukraine was moving armies about with doubtful 
purpose. Denikin and his Cossacks, supported 
by French, British and Italian detachments based 
on the Black Sea, was pushing up the Dniester, 
Dnieper and Don. Admiral Koltchak was trying 
to drive west into Russia from Omsk. On every 
front the civil war swayed to and fro with incon- 
clusive issue. To all appearance it might sway to 
and fro for ever. 

That was the situation the Allies took in hand 
at the beginning of the Conference in Paris. They 
could not forget what Russia had done in the early 
days of the war, when Rennenkampf 's incursion 
into East Prussia had detained German divisions 
that might otherwise have been overwhelming 
France in the west. Neither could they forget 
that they were at Paris to make peace, and a peace 
that left Russia torn by civil war could hardly 
be called peace at all. As it was the very ques- 
tion What is Russia? could not be answered. The 
Bolsheviks were of course not represented at 
Paris, for the Allies were actually, though not 
formally, at war with them and were starving 
their country of necessities by blockade. Various 
anti-Bolsheviks, including M. Tchaikovsky, M. 



Ii8 J he Peace in the Making 

Sazonoff and Prince Lvoff, were there, but it was 
manifestly futile to enter into compacts with men 
to whom no effective authority attached at all. 
Either Eussia must be ignored altogether or the 
Allies must take the initiative themselves and 
evolve some solution of the crisis. 

Their way was by no means clear. Feeling ran 
high against the Bolsheviks in every Allied coun- 
try. They had so weakened Eussia, the charge 
went, as to leave her prostrate before Germany, 
and they had signed the surrender peace of Brest- 
Litovsk, at a moment when a still effective Eussia 
might have been sealing the final victory of the 
Allies. Apart from that, opinion in all Allied 
countries with regard to the Bolsheviks was di- 
vided. All classes were at one in condemning 
their atrocities, though the degree of credulity 
with which every kind of irresponsible legend was 
accepted tended to vary. There was a left wing in 
Great Britain and America and Italy and France 
that sympathised with much of Lenin's political 
doctrine, and a right wing that hated his theories 
hardly less than the methods by which he imposed 
them. To the latter class any kind of compromise 
or even communication with the Bolshevik leaders 
was anathema. The former, realising the hope- 
lessness of attempting to subdue Eussia by force 
of arms, were prepared to welcome any opportu- 
nity of negotiation on reasonable terms. 

Another factor to be reckoned with — particu- 
larly since it continued to influence the Conference 
to the end — was the special attitude of France. 



Lenin and Bela Kun 119 

France had large financial interests in Russia. 
Her investors were large holders of Russian 
bonds, and when the interest was no longer forth- 
coming the French Government had had to as- 
sume responsibility for the payments itself. But 
the principal was in jeopardy as well as the in- 
terest, and it was not surprising that the bitter 
indignation of the French against the men os- 
tensibly responsible for Russia's financial default 
should powerfully stimulate the demand for the 
support of leaders like Koltchak or Denikin, who 
would at the same time overthrow the authors of 
Russia's bankruptcy and undertake themselves to 
honour the country's obligations to its creditors. 
Such were the tendencies and cross-currents of 
which the Peace Conference had to take account 
in January. The Russian problem was two-fold, 
concerning both the pacification of the country 
and its representation at the Conference. The 
Allied leaders decided on a move that might have 
settled both questions, simultaneously. It was 
clear that if any result of value was to be attained 
the fighting must stop and the heads of the oppos- 
ing factions must come together and discuss their 
differences. The decision to act on that decision 
was not reached without other alternatives being 
fully canvassed. The French were strong advo- 
cates of military intervention. When the Council 
of Ten took the matter in hand Marshal Foch was 
present at the discussion. President Wilson, ac- 
cording to reports which penetrated outside the 
council chamber, asked him what force would be 



/ 



120 The Peace in the Making 

required to subdue the Bolsheviks. His estimate 
was 350,000 of the best troops. The President 
turned to Mr. Lloyd George, "How many would 
Great Britain supply?" he asked. "None," re- 
plied the Prime Minister tersely; "how many 
would America supply ? " " None, ' ' said the Pres- 
ident. Mr. Wilson then turned to M. Clemenceau, 
' ' And France 1 " he questioned. Clemenceau made 
a gesture of resignation. "None," he jerked out. 
That account of what happened may not be ver- 
bally accurate — according to Mr. Bullitt it was 
Mr. Lloyd George who took the initiative — but in 
substance at any rate it fairly represents the dis- 
cussion. 

Military action on the great scale being thus 
ruled out, the question of a conference of the Bus- 
sian groups was taken up in earnest. That solu- 
tion was urged on the Council of Ten by Presi- 
dent Wilson and Mr. Lloyd George. The latter 
indeed was for summoning representatives of all 
the groups to Paris, but M. Clemenceau frowned 
the suggestion out of court. The proposal finally 
agreed on stood technically in the name of Presi- 
dent Wilson, but the British Prime Minister was 
understood to be entitled to an equal share of the 
credit of authorship. In view of subsequent 
events the material portions of the official an- 
nouncement drawn up by Mr. Wilson and issued 
on January 22nd are worth quoting textually. 

"The single object the representatives of the 
Associated Powers have had in mind in the 



Lenin and Bela Kun 12 1 

discussions of the course they should pursue 
with regard to Russia has been to help the Rus- 
sian people, not to hinder them or to interfere 
in any manner with their right to settle their 
own affairs in their own way. They regard the 
Russian people as their friends, not their ene- 
mies, and are willing to help them in any way 
they are willing to be helped. 

"They recognise the absolute right of the 
Russian people to direct their own affairs with- 
out dictation or direction of any kind from out- 
side; they do not wish to exploit or make use 
of Russia in any way. 

"They recognise the Revolution without res- 
ervation, and will in no way and in no circum- 
stances aid or give countenance to any attempt 
at a counter-revolution. It is not their wish or 
purpose to favour or assist any one of the or- 
ganised groups now contending for the leader- 
ship and guidance of Russia as against the oth- 
ers. Their sole and sincere purpose is to do 
what they can to bring Russia peace and an 
opportunity to find her way out of her present 
troubles. 

"In this spirit and with this purpose they 
have taken the following action : 

"They invite every organised group that is 
now exercising or attempting to exercise politi- 
cal authority or military control anywhere in 
Siberia or within the boundaries of European 
Russia as they stood before the war just con- 
cluded (except in Finland) to send representa- 



122 The Peace in the Making 

tives, not exceeding three representatives from 
each group, to the Princes Islands, Sea of Mar- 
mora, where they will be met by representatives* 
of the Associated Powers, provided in the mean- 
time there is a truce of arms among the par- 
ties invited, and that all armed forces anywhere 
sent or directed against any people or territory 
outside the boundaries of European Eussia, as 
they stood before the war, or against Finland, 
or against any people or territory whose au- 
tonomous action is in contemplation in the 
Fourteen Articles upon which the present peace 
negotiations are based, shall be meanwhile with- 
drawn and aggressive military action cease." 

The message concluded with an assurance that 
every facility would be extended by the Allies to 
representatives of every group to enable them to 
reach Princes Islands by the time appointed, Feb- 
ruary 15th. 

Quotation of the main passages in the Allies' 
invitation has been necessary in order that the 
causes of the failure that attended it may be duly 
appreciated. Its weakness was that it stipulated 
for a general truce as a condition of the holding 
of the conference at Prinkipo, or Princes Islands. 
That condition was proper enough in itself, but 
it meant on the face of it that a rejection of the 
truce by any one or more of the parties invited 
would invalidate ithe whole proposal. It Was 
moreover unfortunate that the Allies offered no 
assurance that they would during such a truce dis- 



Lenin and Bela Kun 123 

continue the despatch of munitions to Koltchak 
and Denikin, who were almost entirely dependent 
on such supplies. 

Those defects in the proposal would have given 
the Bolsheviks some justification for looking 
askance at it, but in point of fact it was not they 
at all who were responsible for the breakdown 
of the project. The first response to the Allied 
invitation came from Paris, where representatives 
of the various anti-Bolshevik groups were assem- 
bled. LThe very evening the announcement of the^ 
Council of Ten was made a British correspondent 
in Paris* was " authorised to declare herewith 
that the Governments of Omsk (Admiral Kolt- 
chak), Ekaterinodar (General Denikin), Arch- 
angel and the Crimea will categorically refuse to 
send representatives to confer with the assassins 
of their kinsmen and the destroyers of the Father-^. 
land.J^y Twenty-four hours later, Prof. Miliukoff, 
the leader of the former Cadet party in Eussia, 
made it known that "he deplored the Allied invi- 
tation to meet the Bolsheviks on Princes Islands.' ' 
These unofficial expressions of opinion were short- 
ly confirmed by formal declarations on the part 
of all the most important of the groups in ques- 
tion. . 

The Bolsheviks meanwhile had never received \ 
the Allied invitation at all. It should have been 
sent them by wireless. There were no mechanical 
difficulties whatever in the way. The invitation 
was simply never sent, for reasons which the 

* Dr. E. J. Dillon, of the Daily Telegraph. 



124 The Peace in the Making 

French wireless authorities or their superiors 
have failed to explain. The Moscow Government 
had, however, become informed of the proposal 
through wireless Press messages picked up by 
its receiving stations. The Allied move manifest- 
ly took the Bolshevik leaders by surprise, and 
their first step was to satisfy themselves of its 
bona fides. They immediately despatched a wire- 
less message to their representative at Stockholm, 
making certain enquiries and concluding "we do 
not reject the principle of a conference and on 
receiving confirmation we will carefully consider 
the proposal. " Inquiries were also made of M. 
Jean Longuet, the French Socialist leader, and 
editor of the Socialist Journal, Le Populaire, but 
the French Government after some hesitation re- 
-fused to give M. Longuet facilities for replying. 
Lenin, however, appeared to be content with 
the information he got, for on February 4th, the 
following definite acceptance was sent out from 
Moscow by Tchitcherin, the Commissary for For- 
eign Affairs in the Soviet Government : — ■ 

''The Eussian Soviet Government . . . de- 
clares that it is ready if there be occasion to 
enter into a general agreement with the Entente 
Powers on their undertaking not to interfere 
in Eussian internal affairs. On the basis in- 
dicated, the Eussian Soviet Government is dis- 
posed to enter into immediate conference on 
Princes Islands or at some other place, be it 
with all the Entente Powers or with some of 



Lenin and Bela Kun 125 

them separately, or even with some Russian po- 
litical groups at the request of the Entente 
Powers. The Russian Soviet Government begs 
the Powers of the Entente to inform it without 
delay to what place its representatives are to 
go, and also the date of the meeting and the 
route which is to be followed." 

Twenty-four hours later a second message was 
sent out announcing the readiness of the Soviets' f 
to acknowledge liability for the debts of Russia to; 
the subjects of the Allied Powers. 

Meanwhile the sands were running out. The 
date fixed for the Prinkipo Conference was Febru- 
ary 15th. On February 9th, M. Pichon said it 
was uncertain whether the conference would be y 
held, as practically no one but the Bolsheviks had 
consented to attend. Three days later it was an- 
nounced that the border nations, the Esthonians, 
Letts, Lithuanians and Ukrainians, had accepted 
the invitation. 

But the prospect of a conference at which the 
Bolsheviks would inevitably predominate was by 
no means to the liking of France, whatever Presi- 
dent Wilson and Mr. Lloyd George might think of 
it. No steps were taken to carry the project 
through, though Allied representatives had been 
tentatively selected. The charge was brought 
against the Bolsheviks that they had not ceased 
fighting,* a sufficiently cynical indictment, seeing 

* Mr. Lloyd George stated later (April 16th) in the House of 
Commons that "they would not accede to the request that they 
should cease fighting." 



126 The Peace in the Making 

that Denikin and Koltchak, supported by the Al- 
lies, were hard at work fighting them, and had re- 
fused the invitation to a truce and a conference. 
February 15th, the date appointed for the Prin- 
kipo meeting, came and went. No conference was 
held. No decision not to hold a conference was 
taken. The whole thing simply lapsed. M. Cle- 
menceau was shot, Mr. Wilson went back to Amer- 
ica to sign Acts of Congress, Mr. Lloyd George re- 
turned to England to deal with Labour unrest, in 
his absence from Paris, Mr. Winston Churchill 
flew over by aeroplane to stiffen up the Council 
of Ten to a militarist policy in Russia. When the 
three chiefs re-assembled to take up the work of 
peace-making again, the Prinkipo proposition was 
by tacit consent left to moulder on the shelf. 

But by that time the Russian problem was being 
approached from a new angle. The Americans 
in particular, though there is every reason to be- 
lieve Mr. Lloyd George shared their view, were 
profoundly impressed with the hopelessness of 
letting things drift. As soon as it was clear that 
the Prinkipo project was well dead they set about 
finding some other means of exploring the pos- 
sibilities of peace. A letter received a couple of 
months before from M. Litvinoff, expressing the 
earnest desire of the Bolsheviks for a settlement, 
had made a considerable impression on certain 
important persons at Paris, and the proposal to 
send an envoy to Moscow to test the value of M. 
LitvinofT's professions found a good deal of sup- 
port. At the instance of Col. House, Mr. William 



Lenin and Bela Kun 127 

C. Bullitt, an official of the State Department at 
Washington, and a member of the American Peace 
Commission, was sent to Russia on that errand. 
The mission was kept entirely secret. Mr. Lan- 
sing, in his evidence before the Senate Foreign 
Relations Committee, said Mr. Bullitt was ap- 
pointed by the Conference, but according to Mr. 
Bullitt himself only the British and American 
delegations knew of his journey. In any case Mr. 
Lloyd George and Mr. Balfour were cognisant of 
it. The whole affair has since become so much of 
a cause celebre, as the result of Mr. Bullitt's dis- 
closures before the Senate Foreign Relations 
Committee, that it is unnecessary to follow the 
incident in detail here. 

Mr. Bullitt duly made his journey, taking with 
him as travelling companions, Mr. Lincoln Stef- 
fens, a well-known American journalist, and Cap- 
tain Pettit, a United States Army Officer. At 
Moscow he had a personal interview with Lenin 
and made the purpose of his visit known. The 
whole situation was debated by the Council of 
People's Commissaries, and Mr. Bullitt was given 
a written statement of the Peace Terms the Soviet 
Government would be willing to accept if they 
were offered by April 10th. 

Before the end of March the two Americans 
(Captain Pettit had not yet returned) were back 
in Paris. The secret of their mission had been 
well kept, and it was not till Mr. Bullitt had draft- 
ed his report that the knowledge of his visit to 
Russia got abroad. What actually happened be- 



128 The Peace in the Making 

came known to a comparatively small circle in 
Paris, but the full story has since been given to 
the world by Mr. Bullitt himself. He sent in his 
report to President Wilson, who appears to have 
been too much preoccupied with something else to 
give it adequate attention. Probably he was con- 
tent in this as in so many other cases to rely on 
the mature judgment of Col. House. 

Mr. Lloyd George on the other hand showed a 
lively interest in the affair. He invited Mr. Bul- 
litt to breakfast, General Smuts being also pres- 
ent. The report was fully discussed and the best 
line of immediate action debated. By this time 
the news of the Bullitt mission was getting into 
the papers, which with few exceptions displayed 
violent hostility to any kind of negotiation with 
Lenin. The Northcliffe journals were fierce in 
their attack on the Prime Minister, and Mr. Win- 
ston Churchill was understood to be moving ac- 
tively in the background in England. Questions 
were asked persistently in the House of Commons 
and disposed of by answers which subsequent 
events have shown to be gravely misleading. 

In the middle of April, Mr. Lloyd George went 
back from Paris to address the House of Com- 
mons. Now at last the full facts would be told. The 
Prime Minister had thrashed out the whole affair 
with Mr. Bullitt. He knew what terms the Soviet 
Government had officially declared itself ready to 
accept. He had discussed the despatch of promi- 
nent British politicians to Bussia to promote a 
solution of the problem. All that was in ques- 



Lenin and Bela Kun 129 

tion was the degree of emphasis he would lay on 
the hopes thus unexpectedly opened up. Such was 
the anticipation. Its fulfilment is best indicated 
by the quotation from Hansard of the Prime Min- 
ister's actual reference to the Russian question. 

"We have had no approaches at all," he said 
in response to a question interpolated by Mr. 
Clynes. "Of course there are constantly men 
of all nationalities coming from and going to 
Russia, always coming back with their own tales 
from Russia. But we have had nothing au- 
thentic. We have no approaches of any sort 
or kind. I have only heard of reports that oth- 
ers have got proposals, which they assume to 
have come from authentic quarters, but these 
have never been put before the Conference by 
any member of the Conference at all. There 
was some suggestion that there was some young 
American who had come back. All I can say 
about that is that it is not for me to judge the 
value of these communications. But if the 
President of the United States had attached any 
value to them he would have brought them be- 
fore the Conference, and he certainly did not." 

Such a statement, made by the Prime Minister 
of England, and read in the light of what had 
actually happened since Mr. Bullitt 's return from 
Russia, put an end to the prospect of any direct 
negotiations with Moscow. The Soviet Govern- 
ment would inevitably have viewed any approach 
with the gravest suspicion, even if the Allies had 



130 The Peace in the Making 

been willing to make it. They knew that a state- 
ment of the terms they would accept had been 
taken to Paris by Mr. Bullitt. They had plenty 
of means of learning what Mr. Lloyd George said 
in the House of Commons. It was hardly calcu- 
lated to elevate their estimate of the political hon- 
our of the Allies. 

None the less the Bullitt mission was not en- 
tirely fruitless. Out of it grew a proposal, on the 
genesis of which Mr. Hoover could cast a good 
deal of light, that some steps should be taken to 
relieve the appalling distress known to be prevail- 
ing in Eussia as the result partly of the Allied 
blockade, partly of the inefficiency of the Bolshe- 
vik administration. It was clear that any enter- 
prise of the kind would have to be carried out by 
neutrals, that it could not be allowed to be turned 
to the military advantage of the Soviet Govern- 
ment, and that the single title to relief must be 
the physical need of the individual. At the end of 
March such a scheme was proposed by Dr. Nan- 
sen, the distinguished Norwegian explorer, in a 
letter to the Council of Four. It was close on a 
fortnight before the letter was answered. Presi- 
dent Wilson, Mr. Lloyd George and Signor Or- 
lando were all in favour of the scheme, but M. 
Clemenceau's signature took a great deal of get- 
ting. The reply was finally despatched to Dr. 
Nansen and issued to the Press for publication 
v on April 18th. The tone of the Allied letter was 
cordial. Dr. Nansen 's proposal was welcomed 



K 



Lenin and Bela Kun 131 

and accepted, the conditions attached to the ac- 
ceptance being comprised in the statement ' ' That 
such a course (the adoption of the scheme) would 
involve cessation of hostilities within definitive 
lines in the territory of Russia is obvious, and 
the cessation of hostilities would necessarily in- 
volve a complete suspension of the transfer of 
troops and military material of all sorts to and 
within Russian territory." 

Dr. Nansen's scheme having been thus approved 
there followed the same tragic farce as after the 
Prinkipo decision. The Allied leaders were one 
and all seized with sudden qualms as to what their 
critics at home would say of people who consent- 
ed to the feeding of Bolsheviks and communica- 
tion with Lenin. Dr. Nansen had to put his pro- 
posal before the Moscow authorities by wireless. 
But wireless facilities proved impossible to ob- 
tain. The French would not allow the message 
to be transmitted by their system. The British 
refused to forward it by theirs. The Dutch sta- 
tion at Scheveningen was not powerful enough to 
reach Moscow. It was May 4th before the Nansen 
proposal reached Moscow by a devious route. The 
Soviet Government immediately sent off a long 
reply, gratefully accepting the proposed relief, 
pointing out that the question of the cessation of 
hostilities was a matter to be discussed with the 
Allies (who had made no suggestion that Kolt- 
chak and Denikin, whom they were at the time 
supplying with munitions, should be checked in 



132 The Peace in the Making 

their activities) and asking Dr. Nansen to meet 
a Soviet representative in a neutral country to 
discuss the whole project. 

That was sufficient loophole for the vacillating 
Four. A story was immediately put about, as in 
the case of Prinkipo, that the Bolsheviks had re- 
fused to agree to a cessation of hostilities. By 
' the middle of May the Nansen scheme was as dead 
as the Prinkipo. Dr. Nansen himself, with whom 
I discussed the outlook about this time, was in a 
state of profound and intelligible dejection. As a 
last resource he left Paris and went home to Nor- 
way in the hope of effecting something from there. 
It was of no avail. The scheme was dead, and 
nothing has been heard of it since. 

Having seen Prinkipo fail and Nansen fail the 
Council of Four now proceeded to reverse its pol- 
icy. The Kussian emigres in Paris, supported by 
practically the whole of the Paris Press, had 
never ceased to urge the Allies to recognise Kolt- 
chak. It was some time before their campaign 
bore fruit. Koltchak was not in good odour with 
democratically minded members of the Allied 
delegations. If he was not a monarchist himself 
he had chosen to surround himself with monar- 
chists, and the Americans in particular were by 
no means friendly to the idea of lending him the 
moral support attaching to recognition by them. 
Japan was the first power to make a move. She 
accorded the Siberian Commander full recogni- 
tion. The other major Allies argued the question 
to and fro. President Wilson, refusing to commit 



Lenin and Beta Kun 133 

himself in the dark, directed the American Min- 
ister at Tokio, Mr. Roland Morris, to go to Omsk, 
interview Admiral Koltchak and report on him to 
Paris. Having done that the President, without 
waiting for the report in question, joined hands 
with the other Allies, who at the beginning of 
June decided with characteristic equivocation not 
to recognise Koltchak formally, but to support 
him with money, munitions and supplies in return 
for his assurance that in the event of his victory 
over the Bolsheviks he would call a Constituent 
Assembly and take other measures approved by 
the Allies. Hardly had this been decided when 
Koltchak began to sustain a series of reverses 
which no doubt caused the more hesitant members 
of the Council of Four to congratulate themselves 
on their refusal to grant him full recognition. 

From this time the Council tended more and 
more to let Russian affairs drift. The French 
army and fleet in the Black Sea were withdrawn 
after something little short of a mutiny, the Amer- 
icans came away from Archangel, and though Mr. 
Winston Churchill succeeded in keeping British 
troops in the North of Russia till the beginning 
of autumn the pressure of public opinion com- 
pelled him to abandon whatever larger projects 
he was cherishing. 

While Bolshevism in Russia was being thus mis- 
handled the same social disease was manifesting 
itself in different forms in more than one coun- 
try in Central Europe. In Germany the new Re- 
publican Government succeeded by drastic repres- 



134 The Peace in the Making 

sion in holding down the Spartacist movement, 
bnt in April and May the best informed persons 
in Paris, who were usually those in tonch with Mr. 
Hoover's Pan-European relief system, were ex- 
pecting to hear at any moment of outbreaks in 
Austria, Rumania, Hungary and Italy. The 
causes of the unrest were largely economic. All 
Central Europe was on the verge of starvation. 
Everywhere the people were calling on their Gov- 
ernments for food, and when the Governments 
failed, as they necessarily did, to supply what wasi 
needed the last claim they could make on popular 
support was hopelessly prejudiced. In Rumania 
the supplies rushed in by Mr. Hoover saved the 
situation. In Austria, things were so desperate 
that no party had the physical strength to make a 
revolution. In Hungary, the outbreak came in 
the latter part of March. 

In this case indeed the causes of the unrest were 
not wholly economic. The trouble arose in the first 
instance out of a misunderstanding, for which 
a member of an Allied military mission was re- 
sponsible, over the demarcation of the frontier 
between Hungary and Rumania. The officer in 
question represented a line, which was in fact in- 
tended to be the temporary boundary of a neutral 
zone, as the permanent frontier between the two 
countries. If that had been the actual intention 
of the Allies, Hungary would have been deprived 
of a large tract of territory and a considerable 
population to which she had a complete right on 
ethnical grounds. Popular indignation at the 



Lenin and Bela Kun 135 

prospect of such a settlement was turned against 
the government that had consented to it. The 
feeling roused was such that the Karolyi admin- 
istration could not stand against it. Bela Kun, a 
Jewish Communist, gained possession of Buda- 
Pesth and established a Soviet Government there. 
The news of the revolution caused profound con- 
cern at Paris, particularly in French circles. The 
poison of Bolshevism had penetrated the cordon 
scmitaire the Allies had worked so hard to create 
and preserve from the Baltic to the Black Sea. 
Once it had got into Central Europe, who could 
tell where it would stop? 

One danger was Italy, where the official Social- 
ists, who had opposed the war from the first, were 
believed to be ready to enter into relations with 
the Hungarian Soviets. "If you want to send a 
message to Bela Run," a French diplomatic offi- 
cial said to me, "hand it to the Italians." The 
situation formed the subject of grave discussions 
at Paris. Military action was decided on. Gen- 
eral Mangin, the hero of the July offensive, was 
called to the capital. It was understood that he 
was to organise a Polish and Eumanian force to 
combat the new peril. His departure was momen- 
tarily expected. He did depart, but only to return 
to his command at Mainz. The Allies had sud- 
denly taken a new decision. The head of the Al- 
lied Food Mission in the area that included Hun- 
gary, Mr. C. K. Butler, had arrived in Paris and 
given his diagnosis of the situation. Twenty-four 
hours after his report had been received an Allied 



136 The Peace in the Making 

general set out for Buda-Pesth as representative 
of the Council of Four. But his name was not 
Mangin, hut Smuts, and he went as conciliator, 
not as aggressor. His mission was quickly dis- 
charged. He formed the opinion at once that Bela 
Kun held no authority in the country generally, 
though Buda-Pesth itself was in his power. On 
the other hand there was no prospect of the es- 
tablishment of any Hungarian Government strong 
enough to administer the country effectively. 
General Smuts returned at once to Paris and 
urged that the Allies should immediately despatch 
a capable administrator to direct Hungarian af- 
fairs till a permanent settlement could be reached. 
Bela Kun had not at this stage developed suffi- 
cient strength to resist such a proposal and it was 
known that the population generally would wel- 
come it. 

The Americans at Paris gave the proposal their 
strong support. The French and Italians did not. 
Nothing was done. Bela Kun was allowed to es- 
tablish himself, encouraged by Lenin, with whom 
he had opened communication. In the middle of 
June a flutter of indignation and scandal was 
caused by the report that the Allies had invited 
Bela Kun to Paris. What had actually happened, 
it turned out, was that a message had been sent 
to Buda-Pesth warning the Communist leader 
that the now imminent invitation to him would be 
jeopardised unless he mended his ways. Accord- 
ing to the wrathful French Press, the author of 



Lenin and Bela Kun 137 

a communication out of which Bela Kun was quite 
dexterous enough to make capital was a British 
official. The Allied policy was now to wait till the 
Communists fell. Unfortunately they did not fall. 
Things drifted on, till at the beginning of August 
a counter-revolution broke out, engineered by Ru- 
manians and supported by Rumanian troops who 
marched into Buda-Pesth, pillaging as they went. 
As a climax, a Hapsburg prince, the Archduke 
Joseph, was placed at the head of the new Gov- 
ernment. That was too much for the British and 
Americans at least. Mr. Hoover, who was on the 
point of leaving France for America, was hurried 
off to Hungary to investigate the situation. 

The Director of Relief went straight to Buda- 
Pesth, made his enquiries, sized up the situation 
with his customary decision, and hurried back to 
Paris to urge on the Supreme Council the need 
for taking summary measures to get the Ruma- 
nians out of Buda-Pesth, and behind the agreed 
boundary line. The Council acted with unusual 
despatch. An ultimatum to Rumania was issued, 
as a result of which the invading troops were 
withdrawn and an undertaking given that the stip- 
ulations of the Allied Council should be complied 
with. At the same time Hungary was told that no 
Hapsburgs could be tolerated, and in the early 
part of September a Socialist, but not Bolshevik, 
Government was formed, charged with the task 
of satisfying the Allies that it was sufficiently re- 
spectable to negotiate with and sufficiently repre- 



138 The Peace in the Making 

sentative to hold its ground. At the end of Sep- 
tember it was still passing through its indefinite 
period of probation and the treaty which the Al- 
lies had ready at Paris remained in M. Dutasta's 
drawer. 



Chapter IX 
BUILDING THE LEAGUE * 

IN many ways the creation of the League of 
Nations was the greatest piece of construc- 
tive work effected by the Conference. It was 
one of the first to be taken up and one of the first 
to be completed. The Commission entrusted with 
the task, the strongest that sat on any question 
throughout the Conference, applied itself to its 
work with resolution, and in spite of sharp differ- 
ences on certain individual points the measure 
of agreement reached was notable. 

The formal starting-point of the work of build- 
ing the League was the last of President "Wilson *s 
Fourteen Points, — "a general association of na- 
tions must be formed under specific covenants for 
the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of po- 
litical independence and territorial integrity to 
great and small states alike.* * Building on that 
foundation began long before the Paris Confer- 
ence opened. It had begun indeed before the 
Fourteen Points themselves were enunciated. In 
1917, steps had been taken by the British Foreign 
Office, at the instance of Lord Robert Cecil, to 
have an outline scheme for a League of Nations 

* The Covenant of the League of Nations is reprinted in full in 
Appendix V, p. 222. 

139 



140 The Peace in the Making 

drawn up. A strong committee was appointed 
under the chairmanship of Lord Justice Philli- 
more, and by the middle of 1918 a draft of a 
League of Nations constitution had been evolved, 
which was sent at once to President Wilson in 
America. While he still had this under considera- 
tion, in December, 1918, a new plan for a League 
of Nations was published by General Smuts, which 
so impressed the President that he had the two 
schemes collated, largely by Col. House, and then 
discussed point by point with General Smuts and 
Lord Eobert Cecil during the opening days of the 
Peace Conference, with the result that when the 
League of Nations Commission began its work it 
had before it, in addition to two statements of 
general principles submitted by France and Italy 
respectively, a detailed draft constitution agreed 
on in substance by both Great Britain and 
America. 

The Commission was brought into being at the 
second Plenary Session of the Peace Conference, 
held at the Quai d'Orsay, on January 25th, when 
a resolution of which the salient clauses were as 
follows, was adopted: — 

"It is essential to the maintenance of the 
world settlement which the Associated Nations 
are now met to establish, that a League of Na- 
tions be created to promote international co- 
operation, to ensure the fulfilment of accepted 
international obligations and to provide safe- 
guards against war. 



Building the League 141 

"The Conference therefore appoints a Com- 
mittee representative of the Associated Govern- 
ments to work out the details of the constitution 
and functions of the League." 

The Commission consisted of nineteen mem- 
bers, two for each of the five major powers and 
nine from the remaining Allied Nations. Includ- 
ing as it did President Wilson and Col. House, 
Lord Robert Cecil and General Smuts, M. Veni- 
selos and Signor Orlando, it was by far the 
strongest body, other than the Councils of Ten or 
Four, sitting at Paris. Considering the cold water 
that had been poured on the League as a practical 
institution both in Great Britain and France, the 
League of Nations Commission at the Peace Con- 
ference began its career under distinctly hopeful 
auspices. M. Clemenceau regarded the whole 
matter with a kind of good-humoured cynicism, 
but President Poincare in his inaugural address 
to the Conference spoke with emphasis on the 
necessity of an effective Society of Nations, aud 
President Wilson's speech a week later, at the 
Plenary Session at which the League of Nations 
Commission was appointed, vitally improved the 
whole prospects of the League. 

At the same time it would be affectation to 
pretend that either France or Italy as a whole 
manifested any undue enthusiasm for the League 
at the outset. It was clear that its chief architects 
would be the British and American representa- 
tives, who found themselves faced with the deli- 



142 The Peace in the Making 

cate task of securing the adoption of their mutual- 
ly agreed proposals without creating any impres- 
sion of an Anglo-Saxon domination. The leading 
figure on the whole Commission was Lord Bobert 
Cecil. President Wilson was the permanent chair- 
man, and he kept perpetually in touch with the 
Commission's activities, but his work as a mem- 
ber of the Council of Ten, and later of the Coun- 
cil of Four, made heavy demands on his time and 
strength, and he was well satisfied to leave the de- 
tails of the League of Nations work to Lord Bob- 
ert Cecil and Col. House. The Japanese represen- 
tatives, Baron Makino and Viscount Chinda, for 
the most part maintained their habitual silence, 
except when the one particular amendment in 
which they had a personal interest was under dis- 
cussion, but M. Leon Bourgeois, who lived only to 
carry his proposal on an international General 
Staff, was constantly on his feet, and the ripe 
judgment of M. Veniselos could always be relied 
on in a crisis. 

One fundamental question the Commission had 
to decide was whether members of the League 
should be bound by majority decisions or only by 
unanimous votes. If they accepted the majority 
decision it would mean that a nation like Great 
Britain or the United States might be committed 
to a policy to which it strongly demurred at the 
will of a majority consisting largely of States of 
the calibre of Liberia and Siam and Guatemala. 
If they refused to be so bound it would mean mak- 
ing every decision dependent on a unanimous vote 



Building the League 143 

and placing the whole League at the mercy of one 
dissentient nation, — an unwelcome revival of the 
principle of the old liberum veto in Poland. 

Between those alternatives there was no middle 
course, and the Commission could only decide one 
way. To submit to a majority decision of a Con- 
gress of Nations meant a definite surrender of na- 
tional sovereignty, and for that the world was 
manifestly not ready. Neither America nor Great 
Britain nor any other nation would agree so to 
mortgage its freedom of action. The utmost con- 
cession obtainable was the provision that in cer- 
tain cases a unanimous vote of the Council of the 
League, confirmed by a majority vote of the As- 
sembly, should be binding. That fully safeguard- 
ed the interest of the major Powers, who were all 
represented on the Council and could therefore 
veto any project in its initial stage if they so de- 
sired. 

Apart from the unanimity question the most 
contentious matters falling under the head of gen- 
eral principles were the constitution of the Assem- 
bly of the League and the sanctions by which the 
decisions should be enforced. Another question 
round which violent controversy has subsequently 
centred in America, the grant of six separate 
votes to the British Empire, raised curiously lit- 
tle discussion at Paris. The British Dominions 
had taken too conspicuous a part in the war, — 
France in particular was too conscious of her debt 
to them, — for their right to individual represen- 
tation to be seriously challenged. They were ad- 



144 The Peace in the Making 

mitted as separate signatories of the Treaty and 
accepted as individual members of the League. 
Whatever opposition there was to that course 
would have assumed even more modest propor- 
tions than it did if it had been more widely rec- 
ognised that the concession to the Dominions is 
in reality a blow at the political solidarity of the 
British Empire, in that it provides the several 
constituent parts of the Empire for the first time 
in history with an opportunity of voting against 
one another before the eyes of the world. 

The constitution of the League had been dis- 
cussed by General Smuts in his pamphlet. The 
obvious, and apparently the only possible, method 
of the appointment of national representatives on 
the League Assembly was nomination by the Gov- 
ernments of each of the participating States, but 
this had been widely criticised as undemocratic in 
that it made no provision for the representation 
of minorities, with the result that the League 
would become merely a League of Governments 
and not a League of Peoples. General Smuts him- 
self was not too explicit on the point, but he did 
at least raise the issue by his submission that 
"both the Governments and Parliaments of the 
States might send delegates, and perhaps even 
parties could be represented by the selection of 
members on the principle of proportional repre- 
sentation." Minds are still at work on this prob- 
lem. Lord Efobert Cecil, for example, has put for- 
ward a proposal not for the transformation of the 
Assembly into a popularly elected body, but for 



Building the League 145 

the creation of a third and purely deliberative 
gathering, consisting of representatives of peo- 
ples, to sit concurrently with the Assembly of the 
League. ' ' There are strong arguments, ' ' he sug- 
gests (in the League of Nations Journal for Au- 
gust, 1919), "for having in addition to the Assem- 
bly a body of the representatives of the popular 
element in each Member country, their method of 
selection being left to the country concerned." 
But the Commission itself had no option but to 
decide on the institution of an Assembly appoint- 
ed by Governments, which were however at lib- 
erty to select in any way they chose. 

As to the means of enforcing the decisions of 
the League, the French, represented by M. Leon 
Bourgeois, agitated with indomitable pertinacity 
for the adoption of two amendments which ap- 
peared to command the practically solid support 
of the nation. One provided for the appointment 
of a League inspectorate, whose business it would 
be to satisfy the Council that individual nations 
were duly carrying out the obligations imposed 
on them in the matter of the reduction of arma- 
ments. The other aimed at the creation of a naval 
and military General Staff, charged with having 
always in an advanced state of preparation plans 
for the mobilisation of the national fleets and 
armies at the disposal of the League in case re- 
sort had to be had to armed pressure against some 
recalcitrant nation, whether a member of the 
League or not. 

No man could have worked harder than M. 



146 The Peace in the Making 

Bourgeois to get his views adopted. Altogether 
he fought his battle five times. He defined his 
principles in the Plenary Session at which the 
League of Nations Commission was appointed on 
January 25th; he brought them up in the course 
of the Commission's discussions; he moved them 
at the Plenary Session in February at which the 
first draft of the Covenant was presented to the 
Peace Conference ; he moved them again while the 
revised draft was being debated by the Commis- 
sion in April ; and he moved them for the fifth and 
last time at the Plenary Session at which the 
Covenant was presented and approved in its final 
form on April 28th. M. Bourgeois' oratory is of 
the copious order, and the speech in which he was 
in the habit of commending his proposals became 
almost distressingly familiar to his colleagues on 
the League of Nations Commission by the time its 
fifth rendering had fallen on their ears. But M. 
Bourgeois wearied not. Even after his fifth re- 
buff he still expressed the hope, fortified by a 
chorus of approving Paris journals, that the 
League itself would in due time accord him that 
favourable verdict which both the Commission 
and the Peace Conference had withheld. 

M. Bourgeois may prove to be right, but the 
objections raised to his proposals were substan- 
tial and they are not likely to be lightly aban- 
doned. It was pointed out with regard to the in- 
spection of armaments that a nation which had 
pledged itself (under Article VIII. of the Cove- 
nant) to supply full and frank information on its 



Building the League 147 

actual and potential armaments could not hold it 
consistent with its dignity to submit to outside in- 
spection as a test of whether its statements were 
true, nor was there any prospect that such inspec- 
tion would be effective. With regard to a League 
General Staff, it was pointed out that in order to 
be able at any moment to direct armed force 
against any nation such a staff would have to be 
perpetually preparing paper plans of campaign 
against each individual country, a process which 
would certainly not conduce to general tranquil- 
lity. Incidentally, any State against which plans 
were prepared would always know in advance 
what they were. 

The French amendments none the less were a 
permanent feature of every discussion of iihe 
League constitution. The real landmark in those 
discussions was the break in the work of the Com- 
mission due to President Wilson's brief return to 
America in February. During the ten days Mr. 
Wilson spent on that occasion in the United States 
sundry amendments were proposed to him by 
friends and foes of the League in his own country. 
One aimed at safeguarding the Monroe Doctrine ; 
one was designed to secure the right of withdraw- 
al from the League to any nation desiring to ex- 
ercise it ; a third had the effect of excluding mat- 
ters of domestic policy from the jurisdiction of the 
League. 

All these proposals Mr. Wilson brought before 
the League Commission on his return to Paris in 
March. The Monroe Doctrine amendment was 



148 The Peace in the Making 

frankly a concession to the critics of the League in 
America. The President himself considered it 
unnecessary. It was none the less thought expe- 
dient to frame a declaratory clause on the subject, 
and the final draft of the Covenant therefore in- 
cluded a provision (Article XXI.) that " nothing 
in this Covenant shall be deemed to affect the va- 
lidity of international engagements such as trea- 
ties of arbitration, or regional understandings like 
the Monroe Doctrine for securing the maintenance 
of peace." 

The second American amendment, on the right 
of withdrawal from the League, was accepted, 
while the third objection was met by the inser- 
tion in Article XV. of a provision that matters 
"found by the Council to arise out of a matter 
which by international law is solely within the 
domestic jurisdiction of that party" shall not be 
within the competence of the League. It is a nice 
question how far the Irish controversy, for exam- 
ple, is excluded from the purview of the League 
by that clause, or included in it by Clause XL, 
which declares it "to be the friendly right of each 
member of the League to bring to the attention of 
the Assembly or of the Council any circumstances 
whatever affecting international relations which 
threaten to disturb international peace or the 
good understanding between nations on which 
peace depends." Though the question is* argu- 
able, there can be little real doubt that any nation 
wishing to raise the Irish problem under that 
clause would be perfectly in order in doing so. 



Building the League 149 

The one really acute difference of opinion on 
the League of Nations Commission arose over 
a desire expressed by the Japanese delegates to 
secure the inclusion in the Covenant of a clause 
declaring the racial equality of all members of 
the League. The whole treatment of this matter 
was singularly unfortunate. There were not many 
things the Japanese wanted out of the Conference, 
and of those few, one, the reversion to German 
rights in China, was likely to be vigorously con- 
tested. There was all the more reason therefore 
for giving Japan anything else to which she had 
a reasonable title. And to such a declaration as 
she sought on racial equality she certainly had a 
reasonable title. The matter admittedly was not 
simple. It might be difficult to exclude delicate 
immigration questions, in which both America and 
Australia had a lively interest. But Japan was 
accepting all the obligations of the League. Her 
navy and army, like those of other nations, were 
to be at its call. It was not a great deal to ask 
that in consideration of that the League should 
formally declare that in its eyes a yellow man was 
as good as a white. 

For that was really all that the Japanese want- 
ed. Baron Makino, who moved the amendment 
embodying the desired declaration, expressly dis- 
claimed any intention of raising the question of 
immigration. He fully concurred, indeed, in the 
previously registered decision to regard immigra- 
tion as a matter of domestic concern, excluded 
as such from the purview of the League. What 



150 The Peace in the Making 

the amendment, which was moved in a studiously 
temperate speech, called for was recognition of 
the ''equality of nations and just treatment of 
their nationals." The sensitiveness of Eastern 
nations on such matters was perhaps underrated 
by the Commission, for though the amendment 
was strongly supported by the Chinese represen- 
tative, Dr. Wellington Koo (almost the single in- 
stance of wholehearted co-operation between the 
two nations throughout the Conference), it failed 
to secure adoption. Australia was the real stum- 
bling-block. Mr. Hughes, who had been conspicu- 
ously chilly in his attitude to the League as a 
whole, was not himself a member of the Commis- 
sion, but he had urged his views with such effect 
that Lord Eobert Cecil, as the principal British 
representative, had forced on him the inherently 
uncongenial task of opposing the Japanese propo- 
sition. He was supported without great enthusi- 
asm by President Wilson, but the Anglo-Saxon 
powers found scant support for their attitude and 
the Japanese proposal was carried on a division 
by a substantial majority. In virtue, however, of 
a decision that no provision should be inserted in 
the Covenant in the face of serious objection by 
any participating nation the amendment failed to 
secure adoption. The Japanese delegates did not 
parade their disappointment, but they did not 
disguise it, and there was a disquieting emphasis 
in Baron Makino 's dignified but bitter expression, 
at the Plenary Session of April 28th, of the "poig- 



Building the League 151 

nant regret" with which the rejection of the Jap- 
anese proposal had been received at Tokio. 

On one other feature of the League of Nations 
it is necessary, in view of subsequent controver- 
sies, to touch briefly. Ever since the final draft of 
the League Covenant was published its tenth Ar- 
ticle has been the object of persistent attack on 
both sides of the Atlantic. Oddly enough though 
the article appeared in almost precisely the same 
form in the first draft it then aroused no antago- 
nism whatever. Its terms are as follows: — 

1 'The Members of the League undertake to 
respect and preserve as against external ag- 
gression the territorial integrity and existing 
political independence of all Members of the 
League. In case of any such aggression, or in 
case of any threat or danger of such aggression, 
the Council shall advise upon the means by 
which this obligation shall be fulfilled.' ' 

The vice of the clause, in the eyes of its critics, 
lies in the fact that it tends to perpetuate the ter- 
ritorial settlement embodied in the Peace Treaty, 
however bad that settlement may be. The reply 
to that objection is that the clause immediately 
following gives full latitude for discussion on, and 
action in regard to, any circumstance threatening 
to disturb international peace or a good under- 
standing between nations. 

But the history of Article X. is of interest. In 



152 The Peace in the Making 

President Wilson's original draft it was much 
longer and more explicit, providing that: — 

' ' The contracting powers unite in guarantee- 
ing to each other political independence and 
territorial integrity; but it is understood be- 
tween them that such territorial readjustments, 
if any, as may in the future become necessary 
by reason of changes in present racial condi- 
tions and aspirations or present social and po- 
litical relationships, pursuant to the principle 
of self-determination, and also such territorial 
adjustments as may in the judgment of three- 
fourths of the delegates be demanded by the 
welfare and manifest interest of the peoples 
concerned may be effected if agreeable to those 
people; and that territorial changes may in 
equity involve material compensation. The 
contracting powers accept without reservation 
the principle that the peace of the world is su- 
perior in importance to every question of politi- 
cal jurisdiction or boundary." 

The difference between the two versions is the 
difference between the explicit and the implicit, 
and though in such matters there is considerable 
advantage in being explicit the two versions are 
not in any sense at variance. It is of the essence 
of a mutual alliance that the contracting parties 
shall undertake to support one another against 
external aggression, and in admitting that he was 
himself the author of the clause as it finally stood 
in the Covenant (he described it, indeed, as "the 



Building the League 153 

very backbone of the whole Covenant") President 
Wilson made it clear that he regarded the pro- 
vision as consonant in every way with the prin- 
ciples he had repeatedly laid down. 

The Plenary Session of April 28th, at which 
the Covenant was finally adopted by the Peace 
Conference, was characteristic of such occasions. 
The Banqueting Hall at the Quai d'Orsay was 
crowded, to the defiance of every canon of hy- 
giene, with the delegates at their three long ta- 
bles with a principal cross-table at the head, with 
a throng of secretaries and other officials lining 
the walls, and a compressed mass of journalists 
of all nations packed tight across the end of the 
hall. The adoption of the revised Covenant was 
moved by President Wilson in a speech which, 
brief though it was, contained two minor sur- 
prises, one the appointment of Sir Eric Drum- 
mond as Secretary-General of the League, the 
other the admission of one neutral, Spain, to a 
seat on the Council. The latter provision evoked 
an immediate protest, which produced more enter- 
tainment than concern, by the Portuguese repre- 
sentative. Then the Conference dragged itself 
through a purposeless two hours of talk. Most of 
the delegates were bored. All of them were tired. 
At the head of the room the "Big Three" diverted 
themselves in undertones at the expense of the 
worthy M. Bourgeois, now launched, with the help 
of what must have been an entirely superfluous 
sheaf of notes, on the fifth rendering of his speech 
in support of his famous amendments. In due 



154 The Peace in the Making 

course he formally moved them. Twenty minutes 
later his colleague, M. Pichon, formally withdrew 
them. 

M. Pichon himself had the temerity to propose 
the admission of the Principality of Monaco as 
an independent member of the League. M. Cle- 
menceau, conversing cursorily with his next-door 
neighbour, suddenly sat up. "Who proposes 
that?". he demanded. "I do," said M. Pichon, 
"on behalf of the French delegation." "Has it 
been discussed?" "It has been discussed and 
there is no opposition." "I oppose it," snapped 
the President of the Council. M. Pichon subsided, 
and his amendment vanished as by some sudden 
disintegration. Baron Makino made his protest 
on the racial equality amendment. M. Paul Hy- 
mans, for Belgium, in a loyal and generous speech 
expressed his regretful acquiescence in the choice 
of Geneva rather than Brussels as the permanent 
seat of the League. The delegate from Uruguay 
and the delegate from Honduras and the delegate 
from Panama delivered themselves. Then sud- 
denly, at a few minutes past five, M. Clemenceau 
rose. "Does anyone else want to speak?" he de- 
manded. ' ' The resolution is moved. Is there any 
opposition? The resolution is carried." The 
delegates turned to one another in bewilderment. 
There was a minute's blank silence. Then Mr. 
Barnes began to speak to the next item on the 
agenda, and it dawned on the perplexed assembly 
that the League of Nations Covenant had been ap- 
proved, that its Secretary-General had been ap- 



Building the League 155 

pointed, that a Council of the five major Powers, 
with Belgium, Brazil, Greece and Spain, had been 
created, that Geneva had been chosen for the 
League's permanent home, and that a committee 
had been charged with preparing an agenda for 
the first meeting of the League Council and As- 
sembly at Washington. With such strange swift- 
ness did what may prove the most powerful politi- 
cal instrument in history leap to birth. 

The endorsement of the League Covenant by 
the Peace Conference and its inclusion in the 
Treaty with Germany did not end the work of 
the League of Nations Commission in Paris. The 
treaty had still to be discussed between the Ger- 
mans and the Allies, and one of the first acts of 
the former was to submit to the President of the 
Peace Conference, who referred it at once to the 
League Commission for consideration, an alterna- 
tive constitution for the League. It did not dif- 
fer greatly from the Allied draft, but it provided 
for the admission of the enemy states as original 
members; for the creation of an International 
Parliament with one representative (up to a max- 
imum of ten) for each million inhabitants of each 
State ; and for equal voting power for every State 
represented. 

These proposals were answered with scrupulous 
courtesy point by point by the Allies, the nearest 
approach to a concession being the assurance that 
certain of them should be brought before the 
League itself when it came into being. But the 
League of Nations Commission, which throughout 



156 The Peace in the Making 

showed itself far more liberal-minded than the 
Conference as a whole, created something of a 
sensation by the advances it was prepared to 
make towards Germany. The British and Ameri- 
can delegates had always been alive to the danger 
of making the League a mere association of vic- 
tors in the war. It was true that most of the im- 
portant neutrals had sent delegates to Paris to 
discuss the League constitution with the Commis- 
sion, and that there was a good prospect that al- 
most all of them would join it as soon as possible, 
but with Russia and Germany and Austria and 
Hungary out it would form a very incomplete In- 
ternational Society. But the opposition of France 
and Belgium was strong, and they were supported 
by considerable elements in Great Britain and 
America. There was therefore no attempt made, 
till the Germans specifically raised the question 
themselves, to secure their early admission to the 
League. 

The German note, however, compelled decision 
one way or the other, and at a meeting of the Com- 
mission held at the Hotel Crillon in the early part 
of June resolutions were adopted approving the 
admission of Germany to the League at an early 
date, with the specific proviso that such admission 
should carry with it full reciprocity in such mat- 
ters as the control of international waterways and 
the regulation of armaments. But Liberalism on 
that scale was altogether too much for the Council 
of Four. The League Commission was told in 
effect to go back and turn out something milder, 



Building the League 157 

which it accordingly did. Whereon the French 
Press, which for days had been struggling, in the 
teeth of a relentless censorship, to expose the 
enormity of the Commission's crimes, began 
gradually to subside. Germany was formally as- 
sured by the Allies that provided she fulfilled cer- 
tain specified conditions they, the Allies, "see no 
reason why she should not become a member of 
the League in the early future.' ' 

The League Covenant was embodied in all the 
treaties with the enemy powers. One effect of 
that was that China, which refused to sign the 
German treaty on account of the Shantung claus- 
es, was able to subscribe to the Covenant by sign- 
ing that with Austria. The League was to come 
into actual being when ratifications of the Treaty 
had been deposited by Great Britain, France and 
Italy. Numerous duties, such as the organisation 
of the government of the Saar Valley, had been 
imposed on it by the Peace Conference, which 
more and more developed the habit of relegating 
to the League any awkward problem which it 
failed to settle effectively itself. The question of 
mandates, responsibility for which was divided 
rather unsatisfactorily between the League and 
the Conference, had also to be dealt with at once. 
It followed that instead of settling gradually to 
work the League of Nations found itself, the mo- 
ment ratification had been effected, launched sud- 
denly into mid-career, with all the responsibilities 
of full maturity on its shoulders. 



Chapter X 
THE CONFERENCE AND LABOUR 

ONE of the few consistently smooth-running, 
and therefore consistently inconspicuous, 
pieces of work effected at the Conference 
was the creation of an international labour organ- 
isation. On the workers ' side that was no new 
thing. There had long been an International Fed- 
eration of Trade Unions in existence, and among 
individual unions the miners and the textile work- 
ers had both carried their organisations outside 
their own national boundaries. But what was 
projected at Paris was something much more am- 
bitious, an organisation that should unite rep- 
resentatives of employers, workers and govern- 
ments from every country in the world, and whose 
decisions would acquire a moral force that would 
ensure their incorporation into the system of do- 
mestic legislation of each of the constituent na- 
tions. 

The task of building such an organisation was 
entrusted by the Conference at its Second Plenary 
Session, on January 25th, to a commission over 
which Mr. Gompers, the secretary of the Ameri- 
can Federation of Labour, was chosen to preside, 
Mr. Barnes and Sir Malcolm Delevingne, of the 

158 



The Conference and Labour 159 

Home Office, being the British representatives. 
The defect of the commission was the lack of di- 
rect representatives of the workers, though the 
presence of Mr. Gompers, Mr. Barnes and M. Van- 
dervelde, who were appointed by their several 
governments, went some way towards rectifying 
the omission. As far, moreover, as Great Britain 
was concerned, a strong delegation of trade union- 
ists (including Mr. Henderson, Mr. J. H. Thomas, 
Mr. Bowerman, Mr. Stuart-Bunning and Mr. 
Shirkie), summoned to Paris to consult with the 
official British representatives on the Labour 
Commission, had a good deal to do with the shap- 
ing of the draft on which the commission's final 
report was largely built. 

In attempting to frame regulations, or to pro- 
vide for the framing of regulations, applying to 
industrial conditions in countries as diverse as 
Britain and Japan, America and India, the com- 
mission was approaching an almost impossible 
task. Something of what was aimed at is indi- 
cated in the preamble to the final draft of its re- 
port, in which the raison d'etre of the discussions 
is declared to be the fact that 

"conditions of labour exist, involving such 
injustice, hardship and privation to large num- 
bers of people as to produce unrest so great that 
the peace and harmony of the world are im- 
perilled; and an improvement of those condi- 
tions is earnestly required: as for example, by 
the regulation of hours of work, including the 



160 The Peace in the Making 

establishment of a maximum working day and 
week, the regulation of the labour supply, the 
prevention of unemployment, the provision of 
an adequate living wage, the protection of the 
worker against sickness, disease and injury 
arising out of his employment, the protection 
of children, young persons and women, provi- 
sion for old age and injury, protection of the in- 
terests of workers when employed in countries 
other than their own, recognition of the princi- 
ple of freedom of association, the organisation 
of vocational and technical education and other 
measures." 

The real motive force behind the whole work 
was the conviction expressed in the declaration 
(in the same preamble) that "the failure of any 
nation to adopt humane conditions of labour is 
an obstacle in the way of other nations which de- 
sire to improve the conditions in their own coun- 
tries. ' ' While anything like the immediate equali- 
sation of labour conditions the world over would 
have been an unattainable ideal it was possible 
for the initial step at least to be taken, in a level- 
ling-up process that would go some way towards 
solving the problem involved in the flooding of 
European markets by the products of cheap Ori- 
ental labour. I discussed with the Japanese mem- 
ber of the Labour Commission and with one of the 
Chinese plenipotentiaries the question of how far 
the Commission's recommendations were really 
applicable to the two countries they themselves 



The Conference and Labour 161 

represented. Both of them frankly admitted the 
difficulties and the length of the road to be trav- 
elled from the stage of industrial development at 
which China and Japan stood at the moment to 
the elaborated organisation contemplated by the 
Commission. Both, however, were convinced that 
the fact of an international standard being thus 
set would strengthen the hand of their govern- 
ments and of governments like their own, and ef- 
fectively promote the passage of domestic legisla- 
tion designed to improve industrial conditions. 

At the same time the Commission had to take 
cognisance of obvious facts. To have imposed on 
the constituent nations obligations there was no 
prospect or possibility of their discharging would 
have been to stultify the whole undertaking. That 
point was urged moderately but forcibly by Lord 
Sinha, speaking on behalf of India at the Plenary 
Session on April 11th, at which the report of the 
Labour Commission was presented to the full 
Peace Conference. The difficulty was met by the 
proviso (now embodied in Article 405 of the 
Treaty of Peace with Germany) that "in framing 
any recommendation or draft convention of gen- 
eral application the Conference shall have due re- 
gard to those countries in which climatic condi- 
tions, the imperfect development of industrial or- 
ganisation or other special circumstances make 
the industrial conditions substantially different, 
and shall suggest the modifications, if any, which 
it considers may be required to meet the case of 
such countries." 



162 The Peace in the Making 

• The Commission got through its work expedi- 
tiously, and its deliberations were convulsed by 
none of the crises that periodically agitated most 
of the subsidiary bodies to which the Council of 
Four relegated particular tasks. The chief diffi- 
culty encountered was the discovery made by the 
European delegates that America could not, un- 
der her Constitution, undertake that Congress 
should ratify or even consider the various recom- 
mendations or conventions remitted to it by the 
International Labour Conference, for the simple 
reason that in the United States labour laws are 
enacted in the main by each of the forty-eight 
separate states, acting quite independently, and 
not by the Federal Government at all. A way out 
of that complication was found by providing that 
where a federal state, whose power to enter into 
conventions was limited, had a draft convention 
sent down to it by the Conference it should be at 
liberty to regard this merely as a recommendation 
and take its own steps to get the recommendation 
carried into effect. 

The Labour Clauses of the Treaty in their final 
form were calculated to inspire both satisfaction 
and disappointment. On paper at least a great 
deal has been achieved. Provision was made for 
the establishment at the seat of the League of Na- 
tions, and in close association with the League, of 
an International Labour Office, with a permanent 
Director and an international governing body, 
charged with collecting and distributing informa- 
tion on industrial conditions and developments 



The Conference and Labour 163 

the world over, and with preparing an agenda for 
the annual meetings of the full Labour Confer- 
ence. The lines of procedure for the meetings of 
the Conference were laid down, providing for the 
submission by the Conference to the governments 
of each member nation of either draft conventions 
for their ratification or recommendations for em- 
bodiment in the domestic legislation of the coun- 
try. The general principles accepted by the Peace 
Conference as the basis of all future work in the 
field of International Labour Regulation were ex- 
pressed in a series of nine points, sufficiently brief 
and sufficiently important to be quoted in full here. 
The first of the nine represents a declaration dear 
to the heart of Mr. Gompers. He had had it in- 
cluded in the Clayton Anti-Trust Act in the United 
States, and he was responsible for its appearance 
at the head of the nine articles of the International 
Labour Charter. Its importance depends on the 
emphasis thrown on the word " merely," without 
which it would lend itself to a variety of diverse 
and uncertain interpretations. 

The nine points of the Charter are : — 

First. — The guiding principle that labour 

should not be regarded merely as a commodity 

or article of commerce. 
Second. — The right of association for all lawful 

purposes by the employed as well as by the 

employers. 
Third. — The payment to the employed of a 

wage adequate to maintain a reasonable 



164 The Peace in the Making 

standard of life, as this is understood in their 
time and country. 

Fourth. — The adoption of an eight hours' day 
or a forty-eight hours ' week as the standard 
to be aimed at where it has not already been 
attained. 

Fifth. — The adoption of a weekly rest of at 
least twenty-four hours, which should include 
Sunday wherever practicable. 

Sixth. — The abolition of child labour and the 
imposition of such limitations on the labour 
of young persons as shall permit the contin- 
uation of their education and assure their 
proper physical development. 

Seventh. — The principle that men and women 
should receive equal remuneration for work 
of equal value. 

Eighth. — The standard set by law in each coun- 
try with respect to the conditions of labour 
should have due regard to the equitable eco- 
nomic treatment of all workers lawfully resi- 
dent therein. 

Ninth. — Each State should make provision for 
a system of inspection in which women should 
take part, in order to ensure the enforcement 
of the laws and regulations for the protection 
of the employed. 

On all those grounds the Labour clauses of the 
Treaty inspired satisfaction. They inspired dis- 
appointment in that they made provision for noth- 
ing more tangible than an abstract expression of 



The Conference and Labour 165 

opinion on the part of the International Labour 
Conference. The Conference could hold its an- 
nual meetings, discuss subjects of the highest im- 
portance, arrive at possibly unanimous conclu- 
sions, and then be powerless to do more than place 
those conclusions before the Governments of the 
individual states for adoption or rejection. That 
meant that the Conference would have consider- 
ably less authority in the industrial world than 
the League of Nations in the political. Nations 
associating themselves with the League did at 
least pledge themselves to observe its findings 
when those findings were unanimous. Nations 
joining the International Labour Conference gave 
no such undertaking. They retained full liberty to 
read through the recommendations of the Con- 
ference, bring them formally before the legisla- 
tive authority in their country, and then dismiss 
them from further consideration. 

Mr. Barnes, when challenged as to whether the 
Conference could in fact do more than enunciate 
admirable sentiments, was constrained to admit 
that technically it could not. But he was perfectly 
justified in his contention that recommendations 
coming with all the moral force attaching to a 
resolution backed by at least two-thirds of the 
members of the International Conference would 
command the very serious attention of every leg- 
islature before which they were brought. The fact 
is that the International Labour Conference, like 
the League of Nations itself, will prove itself by 
its work. It will be what it makes itself. If the 



166 The Peace in the Making 

Governments associated with it resolve that it 
shall be what it might be, and appoint to it the san- 
est and ablest representatives they have at their 
command, its decisions will, as the Labour mem- 
ber of the British War Cabinet claimed, acquire 
a moral force that will go far to compensate for 
their lack of binding authority. 

The Germans, on receiving the draft Peace 
Treaty on May 7th, applied themselves with par- 
ticular diligence to the study of the labour clauses. 
That was not surprising, for labour conditions in 
Germany have long been superior on the average 
/ to those in most Allied countries, and Germany's 
experience in that field fully entitled her to ex- 
press herself on the shaping of a permanent In- 
ternational Labour organisation. Three days 
after their receipt of the Treaty, the German dele- 
gates at Versailles made the labour clauses the 
subject of formal representations to the Allies. 
They submitted an alternative draft of an agree- 
ment on labour questions, suggested with some 
justice that the views of the workers found inade- 
quate expression in the Allied draft, urged with 
much reason that all nations should join in the la- 
bour agreement, whether they were members of 
the League of Nations or not, and proposed as a 
practical measure that an International Congress 
of Workers should be summoned to meet forth- 
with at Versailles, taking as a basis the decisions 
of the International Trade Union Conference (it 
was in point of fact an International Socialist 
Conference) held at Berne a few months before. 



The Conference and Labour 167 

An arriere pensee was pretty clearly traceable in 
these proposals, whatever their intrinsic merit. 
Germany was well aware that the workers in Al- 
lied countries were less hostile to her than other 
classes of the community, and a workers' confer- 
ence at Versailles at the very moment the modifi- 
cation of the Treaty terms was under discussion 
could hardly fail to be to her advantage. 

On that or other grounds M. Clemenceau re- 
turned to the German representations what is con- 
ventionally known as a reasoned reply which con- 
sisted of a decorous but decided rejection of the 
several proposals. On one point, however, a con- y 
cession was subsequently made. It was mani- 
festly to everyone's interest that Germany should 
be bound from the first by any engagements en-Y 
tered into by other nations on labour questions. 
Several neutrals, moreover, indicated that they 
would not join in the Washington Conference in 
October if Germany was excluded. The Allies 
could not raise themselves to the pitch of courage y 
or magnanimity entailed in formally inviting Ger- 
many to send representatives to Washington. It 
was therefore solemnly intimated that, while no 
definite invitation would be extended, if Germany 
cared to send delegates to America about the time 
of the Conference they would be permitted to land, 7 
and it would then be for the Conference itself to 
decide whether they should take part in the de- 
liberations. Of which triumph of statesmanship 
it may be observed that it is in every way worthy 
of the body from which it emanated. 



Chapter XI 
THE FEEDING OF EUROPE 

IN Mr. Herbert Hoover's room at the Hotel 
Crillon there hung a remarkable map that told 
a great story. It was a map of Europe, which 
the officials of the United States Food Adminis- 
tration had scored with their signs. Beginning at 
the extreme left-hand margin of the map, some- 
where out in Mid- Atlantic, there was marked out 
a series of steamship routes, each of them starting 
from an American port, each of them directed to 
the coast of some half-starved European Nation. 
In the area of what was known as the Northern 
Eelief fell Finland, the Baltic States (Esthonia, 
Latvia and Lithuania), Poland, Czecho-Slovakia 
(so far as it was reached by the Elbe, not by the 
Adriatic), Germany and Belgium. In the South- 
ern Relief fell Austria, Czecho-Slovakia (so far as 
it was reached by the Adriatic, not by the Elbe), 
Hungary, Jugo-Slavia, Bulgaria, Rumania and 
Turkey. 

Along those black lines the food ships sped 
their ceaseless way, bearing of the abundance of 
America to relieve the necessity of Europe. The 
routes were spaced out in average day's runs and 
each ship was marked by a little flag that moved 

168 



The Feeding of Europe 169 

on the map as the ship it stood for moved in the 
ocean, reporting its position morning by morning 
to Room 219 at the Crillon. The shape of the flag 
meant one thing and the colour of it meant an- 
other. There was one colour for a milk cargo, 
another for wheat and rye, another for peas and 
beans, and so forth. You could trace a northern 
line running up the British Channel, across the 
North Sea, up the Rhine for Germany, or up the 
Elbe for Czecho-Slovakia, or through the Kiel 
Canal and the Baltic for Dantzig, or still further 
on to the Gulf of Finland, into Abo or Helsingfors, 
the little flags pegging themselves along a couple 
of hundred miles or so each day, till they came 
to rest at last in the harbour where the freight 
was to go ashore. 

The southerly flags moved likewise, one work- 
ing up the Adriatic to Spalato or Fiume or 
Trieste, another dropping off as early as Palermo, 
another little argosy running up under Gallipoli 
and on to Varna or Constanza, or furrowing the 
length of the Black Sea to Batoum. There were 
other maps of not less interest — one in particular 
showing the Food Commission's wonderful net- 
work of telegraphs — and other points of not less 
interest on this map, but enough has perhaps been 
said to convey some idea of the complexity and 
comprehensiveness of the organisation the Allies, 
and America foremost among them, constructed 
in the early months of 1919. 

Strictly speaking the Food Commission was 
not part of the Conference at all. The business 



170 The Peace in the Making 

of the Conference was to restore peace to the 
world. The business of the Commission was to 
keep a great part of the world from dying before 
peace had been restored. An Inter- Allied organi- 
sation for joint purchase and allocation had been 
at work long before the end of the war, but with 
the armistice it's functions changed. Not merely 
the Allied countries but the former enemy States, 
almost all in a condition of pitiable impoverish- 
ment, had to be considered. The old organisa- 
tion was remodelled to meet the new needs, Lord 
Reading and Sir John Beale, then Secretary of 
the Ministry of Food, taking a leading part in 
the work of the British side. 

But the undertaking was not set on a permanent 
footing till the formation of the Supreme Eco- 
nomic Council, brought into being by a resolution 
of the Supreme War Council moved by President 
Wilson early in February. The new body was 
given full control over questions of finance, food, 
blockade and control of shipping and raw ma- 
terials for the period of the armistice. Lord Rob- 
ert Cecil was the chief British representative, and 
Mr. Hoover the chief American. So far as the 
relief of starvation was concerned it was admin- 
istered on two principles. Germany had to pay 
for the food she wanted. In other cases receipts 
were taken and full accounts kept. The American 
Congress voted a hundred million dollars and the 
British Treasury allocated twelve million pounds 
for free relief, Sir William Goode having charge 
of the administration of the British fund. In 



The Feeding of Europe 171 

April, the scope of the Council was broad- 
ened, various existing Inter-Allied bodies being 
brought under its ultimate control. By the time 
it had been at work a few months a conclusive case 
had been established for its perpetuation on a per- 
manent basis in close association with the League 
of Nations. In August its sphere was accord- 
ingly still further widened, the organisation being 
placed on an international instead of a purely In- 
ter-Allied footing. Its authority in the economic 
field in the future will be a factor of material im- 
portance in the relationships of nations. 

But during the Peace Conference the control of 
the Supreme Economic Council was in the hands 
of the Allies alone. Its leading figure on the ad- 
ministrative side was Mr. Hoover. On the delib- 
erative that role was shared between the American 
Food Controller and Lord Robert Cecil. It is 
worth while recording in that connection a signifi- 
cant incident which threw a striking light on the 
ascendancy established by Lord Robert Cecil at 
Paris. It was agreed at the outset that a rep- 
resentative of each of the four principal States 
participating should preside over meetings of the 
Council in turn. 

Great Britain was given first place, and Lord 
Robert Cecil accordingly took the chair at the 
first meeting. At the second, Mr. Hoover should 
have presided, but he turned to Lord Robert and 
asked him to act in his place. At the third, M. 
Clementel, the French Minister of Commerce, ex- 
ercised his right and occupied the chairman's seat. 



172 The Peace in the Making 

At the fourth, Signor Crespi, the Italian repre- 
sentative, asked permission to waive his claim in 
favour of Lord Robert. That completed the first 
round. The second, which then began, differed 
from it only in the fact that on this occasion the 
French representative fell into line with his 
American and Italian colleagues. From that time 
Lord Robert Cecil presided as a matter of course 
over the meetings of the Council whenever he was 
present. 

By the time the Council had got well to work 
it had covered Europe with a marvellous network 
of relief agencies, established and directed by 
administrators, for the most part American and 
British, appointed by, and perpetually in touch 
with, Paris. As soon as the war was over Presi- 
dent Wilson instructed General Pershing to put 
at Mr. Hoover's disposal any army officer the Di- 
rector-General of Relief might desire. Of that 
arrangement Mr. Hoover took full advantage. An 
officer spending a week's leave in Paris would find 
himself stopped in the street by a Food Adminis- 
tration official with whom he had some small ac- 
quaintance, and challenged as to why he should 
not get off forthwith to organise food distribution 
in some remote spot in the far East of Europe. 
He would protest that he knew nothing of the 
work or the place or the people or the language. 
No matter. He was the man for the job. Some- 
one was wanted and he was the someone. He 
would beg a few hours to consider, then ring up 
to ask what clothes he ought to take with him. 



The Feeding of Europe 173 

Then he would vanish out of sight and out of 
knowledge till some chance traveller from that 
quarter of the globe turned up one day in Paris 
to tell how Hoover's man there was keeping a 
whole population alive. 

It was by such swift and decisive methods that 
the food organisation — actually it concerned itself 
with many other things than food, notably coal, 
shipping and raw material — was built up. The 
American Congress in voting its hundred million 
dollars had excluded Germany and Austria from 
benefit. The American Relief Administration 
therefore left those countries alone. Great Britain 
took Austria in hand, and Germany was able to 
pay, partly in gold, partly in commodities, such as 
potash, for the food the Allies were prepared to 
have shipped to her. France and Italy were fully 
represented on the Supreme Economic Council, 
but they took a less prominent part than the An- 
glo-Saxon powers in the work of local adminis- 
tration. Italy indeed deserves much credit for the 
public spirit with which she rushed consignments 
of her own military stores into Austria at a criti- 
cal moment, though that particular example of 
magnanimity was more than counter-balanced by 
the obstructions she offered at a rather later date 
to the transport of food to the Southern Slavs. 

The number of lives preserved by the Allies' 
relief schemes is quite beyond computation, but 
it runs unquestionably into several millions. But 
even that touched only the edge of the problem 
presented by the incalculable need of Europe. Of 



174 The Peace in the Making 

what that need really meant only the Relief Ad- 
ministration, in perpetual touch as it was with 
the distress zones of the whole continent, had 
an adequate conception; but the constant flow 
of travellers, administrators, soldiers, politicians 
and others into Paris, each with his personal story 
of what he knew of the tragedy of this town or 
country or that, kept the Conference as a whole 
in some degree sensible of what the tarrying of 
peace involved in the perpetuation of instability, 
and consequently of arrested production, and con- 
sequently of starvation. No one painted a more 
vivid picture of the conditions under which popu- 
lations of millions were living than General Smuts, 
on his return from Vienna and Buda-Pesth in 
April. In one of the German colonial wars in 
South-West Africa, he recounted, the settlers de- 
termined with characteristic barbarity to exter- 
minate a whole native tribe. They did it by driv- 
ing out men, women and children into the desert 
and cutting off their access to the only water- 
holes. A Boer from the Transvaal who rode out 
into the desert came on three of the victims, a 
woman and two children, sitting huddled in the 
sand, blank, inert, hopeless. They were doing 
nothing to save themselves. There was nothing 
to do. They simply sat waiting for the death that 
closed inevitably upon them. That, General 
Smuts said, was the impression all he saw of Cen- 
tral Europe made on him. It was a land of men 
sunk in despair, men incapable of effort even if 



The Feeding of Europe 175 

any effort would avail, a land of people waiting 
for death. 

The task of the Allies was not merely to relieve 
the immediate necessities of Europe, but to enable 
Europe somehow to stand by itself. Mr. Hoover's 
appointment, and the staff he had collected, and 
the money he had to spend, all came to an end 
technically on June 30th, 1919, though he had suc- 
ceeded in accumulating enough stocks to bridge 
the short interval between then and the reaping 
of the European harvest. In any case he was 
as emphatic on the need for schooling every na- 
tion to manage its own economic affairs as he 
was in his denunciation of the blockade, whose 
continuance right down to the conclusion of peace 
unceasingly obstructed his efforts. I discussed 
both subjects with him more than once during the 
last three months of his administration. The 
maintenance of the blockade as a military safe- 
guard, he pointed out, was sheer futility, since 
with the British Fleet in occupation of the Baltic, 
and Allied armies holding the Rhine bridgeheads, 
an absolutely watertight blockade could at any 
moment be reimposed at twenty-four hours' no- 
tice. The so-called peasant blockade, consisting 
of the refusal of the peasants to sell food to the 
towns in return for worthless paper money, in 
such countries as Hungary and Austria was a 
serious enough obstacle in itself, but when it was 
accentuated by the external blockade maintained 
by the Allies the position was changed from bad 



176 The Peace in the Making 

to desperate. It was true that even with, open 
frontiers not much conld be effected by a nation 
with no purchasing power, but Germany at any 
rate was in a position to raise certain credits 
abroad for the purchase of raw materials that 
would give work to some part at least of her idle 
and hungry population. 

The connection between starvation and revolu- 
tion is obvious. A people naturally looks to its 
government to give it food, and if the government 
proves powerless to discharge that elemental func- 
tion its last claim to support disappears. The Su- 
preme Economic Council was perpetually fighting 
revolution with food. Again and again, when the 
political condition of some particular country was 
under discussion, the declaration would be made 
by men personally cognisant of the facts that it 
was all a question of whether food could be rushed 
in in time to preserve stability. Eumania was 
considered to have been saved from chaos by that 
means. A leading Italian with whom I was dis- 
cussing the insurgent Socialist movement in this 
country told me there would be revolution if the 
Allies could not find Italy the food and fuel she 
needed. It all depended on that. Mr. Hoover 
himself was a convinced believer in food as the 
one effective antidote to Bolshevism, and in every 
country where there was a government with any 
reasonable show of authority he made it an in- 
variable rule that that government should be put 
in formal control of the food distribution, though 
the actual work was pretty sure to be carried out 



The Feeding of Europe 177 

by the Food Administration's own officers. It was 
a profound disappointment to the Director-Gen- 
eral of Relief that he was not able to put his the- 
ory to the proof in Russia. 

The problems Mr. Hoover left for solution when 
his own work at last came to its end were as much 
problems of transport and finance and distri- 
bution as of the supply of the actual food. I 
asked him what Europe had to look forward to 
when all he had been doing was being done no 
more. His hope then was that by the beginning of 
1920 conditions would be sufficiently settled for 
sowing and reaping to go forward normally in 
most of the countries till then dependent on out- 
side assistance. Some of them, like Belgium and 
Austria, never grew enough to meet more than 
a third or a quarter of their needs, and in such 
cases it would be for the Allies to arrange credits 
for the purchase of food from elsewhere. The 
basic fact was that there was food in the world for 
everyone if it could be acquired, transported and 
distributed in the interests of those who needed it. 

The section of relief work that showed the best 
promise of permanence was the feeding of chil- 
dren. By June, 1919, no fewer than four million 
children were being fed on special dietaries all 
over Europe, the funds being provided mainly by 
charitable effort in the Allied countries, and the 
distribution resting with local committees orga- 
nised in the first instance by the Food Adminis- 
tration's officials. Mr. Hoover had had expe- 
rience of that work long before in Belgium, and 



178 The Peace in the Making 

when he visited that country with President Wil- 
son before the latter 's return to America the 
roads everywhere were lined with what were 
known as Hoover's babies, because they would 
never have been alive at all if it had not been for 
Mr. Hoover. 

The Director-General of Belief was in some re- 
spects the greatest personality in Paris, President 
Wilson himself not excepted. The two men were 
in curious contrast. Mr. Wilson is probably the 
greatest orator in America. Mr. Hoover is not 
far from being the worst. The one is an idealist 
in word as well as thought, the other in thought 
and deed but hardly ever in word. At one meet- 
ing of the experts of the American Commission, 
presided over by Mr. Wilson, Mr. Hoover observed 
with regard to some question under discussion, 
"After all, Mr. President, we must consider the 
expediency of that course." The President 
straightened in his chair. " Hoover," he said, 
"expediency is a word that must never be used 
between you and me." 

No work was ever carried out with less parade 
and advertisement than the relief of Europe. Mr. 
Hoover himself has something like a terror of 
publicity. He believes in deeds and has no belief 
in talk. He is practical, executive, determined. 
Englishmen who crossed swords with him during 
the war, when they were representing Great 
Britain and he America in connection with inter- 
national bargains, saw him in a wholly new light 
when they laid their shoulders to the same wheel 



The Feeding of Europe 179 

with him in Paris. "On the whole I think he's 
the biggest man here," one of them with excep- 
tional opportunities of watching his work said to 
me just before that work came to an end. It was 
the truth, or something very near it, but not many- 
people even in Paris ever grasped it. The Di- 
rector-General of Relief kept far too much in the 
background for that. 



Chapter XII 
WHAT CAME OF IT ALL 

THE first and the chief tangible result of the 
five months' discussions at Paris was the 
Treaty signed by sixty-six representatives 
of the Allies and two of Germany in the Hall of 
Mirrors at Versailles, on June 28th. 

As the climax of the great drama of four-and- 
a-half years of war and the half-year of the build- 
ing of peace the signing of the Treaty was an event 
in the strictest sense historic. As a spectacle the 
ceremony was frankly a disappointment. All its 
concomitants, as well as all the underlying facts, 
should have conspired to make it memorable. In 
■Y the actual event it was not merely not impressive, 
not merely not dignified, it was not even orderly. 

Yet all the elements of the impressive were 
there. The stately gallery in which the ceremony 
was carried out is eloquent with memories. 
Among them all one dominated the mind. Here 
in 1871 the German Empire was proclaimed. Here 
in 1919 the defeat of that Empire's tyrannous 
endeavour was being written into the annals of 
world history. _ 

In the figure of one man beyond all others that 
memory was concentrated. Who could forget that 

180 



What Came of It All 181 

when the German guns were thundering round 
Paris forty-nine years before the Mayor of Mont- 
raartre was a young doctor named Georges Cle- 
menceau If This was Clemenceau 's day. Well might 
he exclaim, "Nine and forty years have I waited 
for this." "Well might the crowds gathered on 
the Chateau terrace look up in unsatisfied expecta- 
tion at the balcony and cry * ' Clemenceau ! ' ' till 
Clemenceau came out from a lower doorway into 
tfieir midst. 

When the session was opened only two seats 
were vacant — those of Mr. Liu Cheng-hsiang and 
Mr. Wang Cheng-ting, the Chinese delegates, who 
had decided they could not sign a Treaty which 
embodied in the Shantung settlement what they 
regarded as a gross injustice to their country. 
The gallery by this time was crowded with a 
throng for the most part sober-vested. There 
were, indeed, few touches of colour anywhere, 
apart from the rich paintings with which the ceil- 
ing of the Hall of Mirrors is adorned. A splash 
of red here and there marking the tabs of British 
Staff Officers, the scarlet crests that topped the 
plumed helmets of the Garde Republicaine, the 
sky-blue uniforms of a handful of French officers, 
alone gave relief from the prevalent sombre black. 

The Germans entered the Hall from the end 
adjacent to the Salon de la Paix. They had been 
awaited with a curiosity which there was nothing 
to repay. They were dressed, like the Allied 
delegates, in correct frock or morning coats. They 
walked normally to their seats, and sat normally 



1 82 The Peace in the Making 

in them when they had got there. None the less, 
they provided indirectly the first surprise of the 
afternoon, for it fell to them, and not to M. Cle- 
mencean or President Wilson, to set the first 
signature at the foot of the Treaty. That arrange- 
ment was indicated in the President of the Con- 
ference's brief opening speech. The Treaty, he 
stated, was before them. He guaranteed it to be 
a faithful replica of that handed to the Germans 
twelve days ago, and he called on the German 
delegates to sign it. 

"When Prof. Mantoux had repeated this invita- 
tion in English Herr Miiller, the German Foreign 
Minister, and Herr Bell, rose from their seats at 
the cross table far on Monsieur Clemenceau 's left, 
filed round to the four small tables in the interior 
of the " horseshoe," where M. William Martin 
was supervising the signature of the four docu- 
ments that embodied the agreements of the Con- 
ference, and duly affixed their signatures. 

When — no longer as enemy delegates — they had 
regained their seats a long procession of the 
Allies, headed by the President of the United 
States, began. With his four colleagues — Mr. 
Lansing, Mr. Henry White (who was in Paris 
through 1870 and 1871, when the Prussians 
trained their guns from Versailles on the capital), 
Col. House and General Tasker Bliss — Mr. 
Wilson, looking neither elevated nor grave, but 
merely businesslike, led the way round the end 
of the long horseshoe and set his name to all four 
Treaties. Thus by a striking and, as destiny may 



What Came of It All 183 

shape it, a prophetic symbolism, it fell to the great 
New World nation to set its name at the very head 
of the signatories of the instrument designed to 
heal the Old World's conflict. 

The Americans were followed by the British. 
It was seventeen minutes past three when Mr. 
Lloyd George, looking essentially brisk and cheer- 
ful, made his way to the signing table. Mr. Bonar 
Law, who followed him, was dour, Mr. Balfour 
smiling almost to the point of hilarity, Lord Mil- 
ner impassive, and Mr. Barnes benign. Behind 
them came the Dominion delegates in order. After 
the British Empire, France, headed by Mr. Cle- 
menceau ; after France, Italy, still represented by 
her old delegates, Baron Sonnino, Signor Crespi, 
and the Marquis Imperiali ; and after Italy, Japan. 

Then followed an unending train of eminently 
respectable black-coated figures, following the ap- 
pointed route and apparently interesting no one 
except when the black coat happened to enshroud 
so familiar a personality as that of M. Veniselos 
or M. Paderewski, or to be matched by a visage 
of like hue, as in the case of the delegate from 
Liberia. So on to the delegate for Uruguay, who 
added his signature at exactly eleven minutes to 
four. Immediately M. Clemenceau rose and de- 
clared the Treaty duly signed and the Session 
ended, what may live as the greatest Treaty in his- 
tory having thus been signed by every delegate 
in the Hall in well under fifty minutes. 

Ten minutes later was enacted by far the most 
striking scene of the day. On the terrace at the 



184 The Peace in the Making 

back of the Chateau, overlooking the splendid 
sweep of water and turf stretching away to the 
far end of the Grand Canal, a crowd of guests had 
assembled to call for ' ' Clemenceau. ' ' The French 
Prime Minister was sought in vain at the balcony 
above, but five minutes later he emerged with 
President Wilson and Mr. Lloyd George on a rash 
pilgrimage to see the fountains play. No prepa- 
ration had been made to clear a way, and the 
crowd, overjoyed, surged wildly round the three 
statesmen. Two or three officials gesticulated in 
despair. Odd groups of poilus tried to hedge 
back the throng with barriers of rifles, only to be 
swept impotent aside. 

By a progress in which volition played little 
part the three reached the top of the sweep of 
steps leading down to the Basin of Latona, where 
the fountains were celebrating the great day with 
their classic symbolism of joy. There the human 
wave spent its force, and the President and the 
two Prime Ministers were left the central figures 
in a tableau that no artist in ceremonial could 
have devised half so well. Far away below and 
beyond, like an alley cut through the rich verdure 
of the park, stretched first the long sward of the 
Tapis Vert, now no longer green, but black with 
massed humanity; beyond that the Basin of 
Afpollo, and beyond again the Grand Canal, its sur- 
face dotted with scores of laden boats. Suddenly, 
from a battery hidden close in a hollow on the 
left, the boom of cannon roared out, while over- 
head a squadron of aeroplanes droned in a sombre 



What Came of It All 185 

but rainless sky. The three statesmen were not 
aloof from the crowd but of it. Back to the 
Chateau they had literally to fight their way. At 
one moment I was within an ace of being precipi- 
tated myself into the midst of the Council of 
Three. Mr. Lloyd George laughed as if he remem- 
bered Birmingham. President Wilson's teeth 
gleamed in his characteristic smile. M. Clemen- 
ceau, with one or two supporters to clear the path, 
kept his course unmoved. Most essentially it was 
Clemenceau's day. 

What was the effect of the document for whose 
signature the greatest concourse of statesmen 
known to history had assembled?* It constituted 
a League of Nations from which Germany was 
for the time being excluded. It confiscated all 
German colonies. It gave parts of German terri- 
tory (Alsace-Lorraine) to France; put parts (the 
Saar Valley) temporarily, and part (Dantzig) 
permanently, under the League of Nations ; gave 
parts (Posen and a portion of West Prussia) to 
Poland; severed an outlying part (East Prussia) 
from physical connection with Germany alto- 
gether; gave parts (Moresnet, Eupen and Mont- 
medy) to Belgium ; and submitted the fate of parts 
(Upper Silesia, Schleswig, portions of West Prus- 
sia and probably Memel) to plebiscites. 

It demilitarised the whole of the left bank, and 
a belt of fifty kilometres on the right bank, of the 
Ejhine. It reduced the German army to a hun- 
dred thousand long-service men, and the fleet 

* Full summary in Appendix I., p. 207. 



1 86 The Peace in the Making 

to little more than a squadron, with a personnel 
of fifteen thousand ; it prohibited the retention or 
construction of any naval or military aircraft and 
vetoed the construction even of commercial air- 
craft for six months. 

It provided for the payment by Germany of 
£1,000,000,000 by 1921 as the first instalment of 
an indemnity, the balance to be assessed by an 
Inter-Allied Eeparation Commission working in 
consultation with a parallel German commission. 
It required the cession by Germany, as a contri- 
bution in kind towards the indemnity, of consign- 
ments of coal to France (over and above the Saar 
Valley yield, which was handed over in perpe- 
tuity), Belgium and Italy for a term of years, of 
dyestuffs and drugs to the Allies as a whole, 
of all German merchant ships over 1,600 tons, half 
the total number between 1,600 and 1,000 tons, a 
quarter of the trawlers and fishing vessels, and in 
addition the construction of 1,000,000 tons of ship- 
ping for the Allies. 

It gave the Allies occupation of the left bank 
of the Ehine for fifteen years as guarantee of 
payment, with provision on the one hand for 
progressive evacuation as instalments came in, 
and on the other for re-occupation either during 
or after the specified period in the event of Ger- 
many refusing to observe the whole or part of her 
obligations in regard to reparation. It inter- 
nationalised various German rivers, it gave Allied 
aviators free flying rights over German soil, it 
required Germany to build canals at the request of 



What Came of It All 187 

other Powers and to grant transit free of duty 
to Allied goods through her territory. 

It forbade any union between Germany and 
Austria without the consent of the Council of the 
League of Nations (on which any single nation 
could impose an effective veto). It stipulated for 
the surrender of the ex-Kaiser and other war 
criminals to the Allies, and it required Germany 
to admit formally in regard to Russia the same 
liabilities she accepted in regard to the other 
Allies. 

Those were, as Mr. Lloyd George said later 
in the House of Commons, terrible terms. As 
he said further, they had to be terrible terms. 
There were plenty of critics in England and 
France, and some in America, who thought they 
were not terrible enough. Liberal opinion on the 
other hand was frankly startled at the Treaty read 
as a whole. Its main provisions had become gen- 
erally known as they were recommended by the 
several commissions and adopted by the Con- 
ference, but the cumulative force of clause after 
clause, penalty after penalty, restriction after re- 
striction, came as something altogether new. As 
much complaint was made of the pinpricks and 
irritations the Treaty contained as of its main 
provisions, drastic as the latter were. The stud- 
ied absence of all reciprocity in the case of re- 
quirements laudable in themselves {e.g. freedom 
of through transit for goods, or the international- 
isation of rivers serving more than one country) ; 
the exclusion of Germany from the League of Na- 



188 The Peace in the Making 

tions and the demand for the surrender (to re- 
place animals seized) of 140,000 milch cows to 
France and Belgium at a time when German chil- 
dren were dying and French and Belgian children 
were being provided for, — these were the features 
of the Treaty on which delegates who recognised 
as necessary the general rigour of the terms di- 
rected their criticism. Among the major pro- 
visions the forcible, even though only temporary, 
severance of the Saar Valley from Germany, the 
transference of the whole of the German colonies 
to the Allies, the annexation to Poland of districts 
claimed to be predominantly German, were the 
occasion of serious misgiving to many members of 
the Allied delegations. The Note in which Count 
Brockdorff-Bantzau demonstrated the economic 
effects of the Treaty on Germany* has already 
been quoted. The justice of its contentions was 
admitted without reserve by one of the highest 
financial authorities among the Allies. 

Of the Allied plenipotentiaries General Smuts 
declared that he signed the Treaty not because 
he considered it satisfactory, but because it was 
imperatively necessary to close the war. General 
Botha was known to be in complete agreement 
with his South African colleague's manifesto,! 
and so to my knowledge were other signatories of 
the Treaty, both British and American. But the 
war had to be closed, as General Smuts had said. 
Only a Treaty could close it, and Europe was slip- 

* See Appendix, p. 217. 
t See Appendix, p. 219. 



What Came of It All 189 

ping too fast into dissolution to incline anyone 
to run the risks attendant on remodelling this par- 
ticular Treaty at the cost of still further delay. 
President Wilson among others was convinced 
that the document must be signed with all its im- 
perfections, and signed forthwith. There were 
those, on the other hand, who would have gladly 
seen it torn up. It is difficult to believe they had 
any consciousness of the reality of the situation in 
Europe. 

The second visible result of the Conference 
discussions was the Treaty with Austria, handed 
to Dr. Renner and his colleagues at St. Germain, 
on June 2nd, signed by them in the same hall on 
September 10th, and ratified by the Austrian Na- 
tional Assembly at Vienna, on October 17th. The 
Allies had at first taken the view that the treat- 
ment meted out to Germany could be meted out, 
mutatis mutandis, to Austria. If nothing but the 
political settlement had mattered that theory 
might have worked well enough. But one of the 
lessons the survey of the world incidental to the 
Paris discussions inculcated beyond all others was 
that in the affairs of men in the twentieth cen- 
tury politics were ever less and less and economics 
ever more and more. The impoverishment the 
war had brought had taught men that their first 
thought in life must be how to live at all. To 
have first applied to the old Austro-Hungarian 
Empire the rules of self-determination and then 
attempted to extract from what was left of Aus- 
tria proper an indemnity based on such princi- 



190 The Peace in the Making 

pies as were approved in the case of Germany 
would have been to attempt the frankly impos- 
sible. That discovery the Allies ultimately made, 
though not till they had wasted a great deal of 
valuable time in trying to do what manifestly 
could not be done. One result of their fitful en- 
deavours was the parcelling out of the Treaty 
into sections, which were handed to the Austrians 
one by one over an interval of months as they 
could be agreed on at Paris. 

The main effect of the Treaty in its final form* 
was to reduce the nation that had once been the 
predominant partner in an Empire of seventy 
million people to a small inland republic of per- 
haps seven million all told. The Dual Monarchy 
was broken up for ever. Hungary was left for 
separate treatment — Bela Kun was still obsti- 
nately in possession at Buda-Pesth, and the Allies 
refused to deal with Bela Kun — but Austria it- 
self, cut off from the sea by the grant of inde- 
pendence to its subject nationalities or the trans- 
fer of its former territory to Italy, knew by the 
beginning of June to what a state its crimes and 
follies in 1914 had brought it. The old Austria, 
as the world knew it before the war, lost Bohemia 
and Moravia, united in the now independent 
State of Czecho-Slovakia ; it lost the Trentino, the 
Trieste region and part of the Tyrol to Italy; it 
lost the whole of Dalmatia to either the new State 
of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes or to Italy; 
it lost Galicia, the ultimate fate of which was not 

* Full summary in Appendix II., p. 214. 



What Came of It All 191 

decided by the Treaty, except in the negative 
sense that it would no longer be Austrian; while 
the destiny of the district of Klagenfurt was to be 
determined by plebiscite as between Austria and 
the Serb-Croat-Slovene State. 

The military terms were drastic. The army 
was to be reduced within three months of the 
coming into force of the Treaty to 30,000 men, 
all volunteers. Navy and air forces were to dis- 
appear altogether, the former vanishing naturally 
in view of the fact that Austria no longer had 
a foot of coast under her rule or a ton of shipping 
on the sea. The Danube, from Ulm, in Bavaria, 
down to the point at which the jurisdiction of the 
former Danube Commission began, was to be in- 
ternationalised, and Austria was to be deprived 
of her representation on the Danube Commission. 
She was required to approve the Covenant of the 
League of Nations, but was herself excluded from 
membership of the League. She was forbidden 
to describe herself as German- Austria, or the Ger- 
man-Austrian Republic, and was prohibited from 
effecting any union with Germany except with 
the consent of the Council of the League of Na- 
tions. 

The economic clauses of the Treaty practically 
constituted an admission on the part of the Allies 
of the impossibility of imposing any specific in- 
demnity on Austria. No one knew what she could 
pay. It was manifest that her capacity to pay 
anything at all was inconsiderable. The only 
thing the Allies could do was to require her to 



192 The Peace in the Making . 

sign a blank cheque. They provided for a Repa- 
ration Commission charged with extracting from 
Austria, in gold or in kind, "a reasonable sum" 
before May, 1921, and with assessing annual pay- 
ments for thirty years from that date. The prob- 
lem was complicated not only by the utter impov- 
erishment of the new Austria, but by the fact 
that the old Austro-Hungarian debt had to be 
equitably redistributed among the states into 
which the Dual Monarchy was now resolved. 

Altogether it might be said of Austria, as was 
said of Germany, that she was being compelled 
to submit to terrible terms, but that the terms 
had to be terrible. At the ceremony of the pre- 
sentation of the first part of the Treaty to the 
Austrian delegates at St. Germain, Dr. Renner, 
the Chancellor of the new republic, had made a 
strong plea for generous treatment. He empha- 
sised the distinction between the old order and the 
new in Austria, between the responsibility resting 
on the former Austro-Hungarian Government and 
that resting on the new people 's republic, dwelt on 
the sufferings of the population since the Armis- 
tice as a result of the severance of their moun- 
tainous country from the regular sources of food 
supply, and insisted on the importance to the 
Allies of listening to the Austrians as well as to 
the other former subjects of the Dual Monarchy 
before reaching final conclusions on the rights and 
wrongs of the political situation. 

The Chancellor was persuasive, as all who 
heard him at St. Germain agreed. But the gov- 



What Came of It All 193 

erning fact in the situation was that merely to do 
justice to the races entitled to their independence, 
without any thought of reparation or indemnity, 
would mean imposing on Austria almost impos- 
sible economic conditions. Vienna was a baffling 
problem in itself. Down to 1914 it had thriven 
largely on industries incidental to its position as 
the centre and the seat of government of an em- 
pire of seventy millions. Now it was to be the 
capital of a state far smaller in population than 
Belgium. There were no raw materials in the 
country, other than timber, out of which to de- 
velop industries. Altogether the Austrian Treaty 
created for the Allies economically at least as 
many problems as it solved. The feeding of Vien- 
na and other cities had to be taken in hand by 
the Supreme Economic Council, and there was no 
indication as to when that charity could cease, 
though as an Allied economist observed genially 
to an Austrian delegate at St. Germain, the Allies 
could not go on paying an indemnity to Austria 
for ever. 

The territorial settlement is distinctly open to 
criticism at certain points, notably in the trans- 
fer of the Southern Tyrol to Italy to give the lat- 
ter a strategic frontier. But in a country where 
races are so inextricably intermingled it is im- 
possible to define frontiers with complete justice 
on the lines of self-determination. President Wil- 
son, for example, told me he had received a depu- 
tation of Slovenes from a little enclave in what 
was for the future to be Italian territory. Their 



194 The Peace in the Making 

protest was perfectly intelligible, but you cannot 
put ring fences round such little enclaves, and all 
that was possible was to assure the deputation 
that the League of Nations would be specially 
charged with safeguarding the interests of such 
communities as theirs. As a matter of fact an 
attempt was made to safeguard the interests of 
racial minorities by the inclusion in the Treaty 
of special provisions designed for the protection 
of such minorities in the territories passing into 
the hands of the Rumanians and the Serb-Croat- 
Slovenes. Those provisions caused bitter offence 
to the two nations in question, though a similar 
undertaking had been given by Poland, where 
the Jewish question was particularly urgent. As 
a consequence both Eiumania and the Serb-Croat- 
Slovene State were at the time these lines were 
written still persisting in their refusal to sign 
the Austrian Treaty. 

Eleven months after the Armistice only the 
German and Austrian treaties had been nego- 
tiated. That with Bulgaria had indeed been 
handed to the Bulgarian delegates. It cut the Bul- 
garian State off from all physical access to the 
iEgean, though economic access was secured her 
through one of three specified ports. It gave 
small areas to the Serb-Croat-Slovene State and 
transferred Western Thrace to the Allies for sub- 
sequent disposition. It reduced the army to 
30,000, and abolished the navy and air forces alto- 
gether. It imposed reparation payments to the 
extent of £90,000,000, extending over a period of 



What Came of It All 195 

twenty-eight years. The worst part of the settle- 
ment was the boxing-in of Bulgaria by the trans- 
fer to other hands of the whole of her iEgean 
coast line. But the whole economic and ethnical 
problem in the Balkans is of a complexity which 
defies any hope of a satisfactory and enduring 
settlement, unless the League of Nations can ef- 
fect such adjustments as much more mature study 
than the Peace Conference was able to give may 
prove necessary. 

After the Bulgarian Treaty there remained the 
Hungarian and the Turkish. The Hungarian was 
drawn up waiting for a stable government to come 
into being at Buda-Pesth, and to all appearance 
it might wait a considerable time. The Turkish 
settlement was held in abeyance while America 
reached a decision on the question of accepting 
a mandate for any part of the old Turkish Em- 
pire. 

What had come of it all, then, close on a year 
after fighting technically ceased, was the signature 
of treaties with Germany and Austria. Three 
other treaties, with Bulgaria, Hungary and Tur- 
key, remained to be signed. War, supported large- 
ly by the supplies and munitions furnished by the 
Allies, was still raging in Russia from Omsk to 
the Polish frontier and from Archangel to the 
Black Sea. The gleam of hope on the horizon 
was the fact that the League of Nations had at 
last come into being. To the question, what came 
of it all, the first answer ought perhaps to be 
the League of Nations. But that must be proved 



196 The Peace in the Making 

by the future. The League enters on a heritage 
that may well daunt its most confident apostles. 
Its strength, apart from the prestige and capacity 
of the men chosen to direct it, is that if the League 
of Nations fails the only visible hope of reknitting 
the world into unity will have vanished. And the 
attempt that has carried the League so far as it 
has gone on its journey can never be renewed if 
failure attends it now. 



Chapter XIII 
AND NOW—? 

AND now the hope of the future rests with 
the League of Nations. The war is over. 
The Treaties so far signed are on record. 
Treaties were essential. Even treaties as imper- 
fect as those signed at Versailles and St. Germain 
were better than a continuance either of the war 
itself or of the uncertainty and instability ruling 
during the Armistice. 

But the treaties in themselves are no guaran- 
tees of peace. They have disarmed Germany and 
Austria, but they have left the struggle in Eussia 
unaffected, and they have been the direct cause of 
sporadic outbreaks of hostilities all over South- 
Eastern Europe between countries or factions dis- 
satisfied with the settlement they embodied. In 
September, 1919, ten months after the Armistice, 
a Paris paper published a map showing twenty- 
five several fronts where it was alleged wars were 
then in progress. Treaties alone, it was clear, 
could bring no peace. 

More than that, there is a serious danger that 
the treaties may contain the actual seeds of war if 
they are to be regarded as the last word the states- 
manship of the world can pronounce on the prob- 

197 



198 The Peace in the Making 

lems of which they treat. No one who saw the 
Paris Conference as it was, who watched the new 
ideals of the White House being 1 shelved tacitly 
and with hardly a protest in favour of the old 
theories of balance of power, of strategic fron- 
tiers and of territorial extension, could have hoped 
to find in the document that emerged from such 
discussions anything more than an instrument 
that would give the world a short breathing space, 
that would let the heats and fumes of war clear 
away, leaving a purer air in which dispassionate 
justice (President Wilson's "impartial justice," 
involving "no discrimination between those to 
whom we wish to be just and those to whom we 
do not wish to be just") could do its healing 
work. 

That remedial process needs an effective in- 
strument to carry it out. The treaties themselves 
provide no such instrument. The commissions 
they constitute are confined to particular func- 
tions — the exaction of reparation, the demarca- 
tion of boundaries, the administration of spe- 
cial areas like the Saar Valley — which leave the 
main purpose of the treaties unaffected. There is 
one institution alone, the League of Nations, ca- 
pable of taking the world the treaties have left and 
remoulding it as changing political and economic 
needs may demand. The League as constituted 
to-day has grave defects, some inevitable, some 
remediable. Its success depends on the goodwill 
of its members. If each nation adhering to the 
League devotes its energies, as a number of re- 



And Now — f 199 

putedly rational critics seem seriously to assume 
that it will, to seeking out any flaw or loophole 
that will enable it to evade its obligations and 
thwart the considered purpose of the League, 
nothing but disaster and failure can lie ahead. 
Even with the goodwill every member of the 
League is justified in expecting from every other, 
difficulties enough are certain to arise. The ex- 
clusion of the late enemy Powers will greatly cur- 
tail both the actual and the theoretical authority 
of the League till the omission is rectified, as 
there is ground for thinking it may be at an early 
date. The exclusion of Eussia is a misfortune 
not less serious, and one with no immediate hope 
of remedy. The provision requiring the unani- 
mous assent of the Assembly to all decisions of 
moment leaves room for infinite obstruction on the 
part of any member with no higher sense of pur- 
pose in the world than to obstruct. The demand 
of America, as presented by the Kepublican ma- 
jority in the Senate, for what amounts in certain 
regards to a position of privilege within the 
League, is a disquieting omen. 

But with all such defects, and others that could 
be added, the League of Nations is to-day the sole 
bulwark against chaos in world-relations. The 
single visible alternative is the Socialist Inter- 
national, but to assume the efficacy of the Inter- 
national in face of the problems that impend is to 
assume a Socialist revolution, constitutional or 
unconstitutional, throughout the world. The men 
who would represent their countries on the In- 



200 The Peace in the Making 

ternational do not in Britain or America or France 
or Italy or Japan control either foreign or do- 
mestic policy. They conld give effect to none 
of the reciprocal undertakings into which they 
would have to enter. The Socialist International 
is, and promises long to remain, sectional. It will 
have its peculiar work to perform, as it has to-day. 
It may do much to bind nations closer, by binding 
parts of each nation closer. But as an alternative 
to the League of Nations it is not relevant. The 
only international council that will serve the need 
of the world is a council of national representa- 
tives authorised to commit the governments for 
which they speak (subject to the provisions of na- 
tional constitutions) to the decisions they take. 
That the League of Nations as its exists to-day 
does provide for, and it is a provision of vast 
moment in the evolution of the world. 

One other alternative to the League is indeed 
envisaged in some quarters. There are cynics 
in abundance in every Allied country who dismiss 
the League of Nations as at best an amiable vi- 
sion and call insistently for the perpetuation of 
the armed organisation represented by the Alli- 
ance that won the war. Germany is disarmed, 
but France must have a Franco- Anglo-American 
agreement to protect her from attack. French 
newspapers can demand the association in the 
same instrument of Italy and Belgium, and even 
discuss soberly the lightening for France of the 
burden of German occupation by establishing in 
the heart of Europe a black garrison from the 



And Now — f 201 

French colonies. The Austrian navy is dead, 
the Jugo-Slav navy not born, but Italy can be 
satisfied with nothing less than the strategic mas- 
tery of the Adriatic. Agreements for the reduc- 
tion of fleets and armies are in the air, but Lord 
Jellicoe can recommend the expenditure of £20,- 
000,000 a year on the provision of naval defence 
for Australia. 

Between those ideals and the ideals of the 
League of Nations the world has to choose. The 
peril is that every country will shrink from the 
act of faith required of it, will preach, as it has 
preached in the past, the gospel of peace, and 
organise, as it has organised in the past, in prepa- 
ration for war. To halt for ever between those 
two ideals will mean either paralysis or war, and 
of the two much more probably war. Full trust 
in the League there cannot be till the League has 
proved itself worthy of trust. But as soon as 
its active work begins, as and when the nations 
that signed the Covenant show themselves ready 
to make their pledge good, according to the 
League that practical support and that loyal con- 
fidence they have undertaken to accord, there 
will be mobilised behind the League of Nations a 
force capable of carrying to a peaceful solution 
even the intractable problems it will fall to it 
to attack. 

It has been made a ground of criticism that the 
League of Nations will have no international 
army, nor even an international General Staff, to 
lend the sanction of force to its decisions. The 



202 The Peace in the Making 

objection is reasonable, though it involves thrust- 
ing into undue prominence what if hopes are ful- 
filled should be anything but a primary function 
of the League. The League's first duty will be 
not to wage, nor even to suppress wars, but to 
take away the occasion of wars. Its ultimate, and 
at the same time its immediate, task will be to 
bring to light a world-purpose, as opposed to 
merely national purposes, and concentrate the mo- 
tive power of the world behind it; not to sub- 
merge, or even to subordinate, national traits, but 
to make them distinctive instead of divisive; to 
foster every form of international co-operation 
and to break down all barriers, whether political 
or racial or economic, to the free intercourse 
of nations. 

Above all, in relation to the present treaties, the 
task of the League will to suggest, and in the 
last resort to enforce, such changes and readjust- 
ments as more mature study of the situation, 
the gradual evaporation of war-prejudice, or the 
emergence of new factors in the political or eco- 
nomic field, may dictate. It is manifest, for ex- 
ample, that the succession of customs barriers 
raised by the series of states now occupying the 
area between the Adriatic and the Black Sea, must 
at the same time hinder trade and promote inter- 
national friction. It may be that a satisfactory 
arrangement will be effected by the states them- 
selves, whether along the lines of a Danubian 
federation or not, but it is certain that in initiat- 
ing or co-operating in such a change the League of 



And Now—? 203 

Nations would make effectively for the general 
welfare of all the nations concerned. 

By Article XL of the Covenant — declaring it 
to be "the friendly right of each member of the 
League to bring to the attention of the Assembly 
or of the Council any circumstance whatever af- 
fecting international relations which threatens 
to disturb international peace or the good under- 
standing between nations on which peace de- 
pends" — the League is given a locus standi which 
confers on it wide powers of judicious interven- 
tion without any suggestion of trespassing beyond 
its sphere. 

It has been said that the League may have in 
certain contingencies to support its decisions by 
force. But it would be a complete mistake to as- 
sume that that means of necessity armed force. 
Unless the League is to fall fatally short of the 
hopes of its first architects its sanctions will be 
less and less military and more and more eco- 
nomic. The threat of blockade against a recalci- 
trant power promises to be hardly less potent 
than a declaration of war. Since 1917 the world 
has had a new vision, and Germany a new and 
shattering experience, of what a blockade can 
mean. I was told by Lord Robert Cecil, who as 
former Minister of Blockade could speak with 
unique authority, that during the last twelve 
months of the war the blockade of Germany was 
carried on practically without the active inter- 
vention of the navy at all. The navy, he was care- 
ful to explain, was always there, keeping the seas 



204 The Peace in the Making 

in all weathers, scrutinising, catechising, check- 
ing, making every assurance doubly sure. But 
when once America was in the war every step nec- 
essary to make the blockade of Central Europe 
watertight was taken on the mainland of the 
United States or South America. The master of 
every vessel declared his cargo and his destina- 
tion and gave all undertakings required, knowing 
well that if he departed from his pledges he 
would never run another voyage while the war 
lasted. Under the League of Nations those safe- 
guards would be materially easier to impose, for 
in a League of Nations blockade there would be 
no neutrals. All the world would concentrate for 
so long as need be on ostracising the nation that 
set itself against the common will of the world. 
It may be objected that after the experience of 
this war the blockade must be regarded as too 
barbarous a weapon for civilised nations to use. 
That argument is not really valid. In the first 
place, it took months or years for the blockade to 
reduce Germany to physical distress, and it is 
reasonable to anticipate that in a League block- 
ade the spectacle of the rest of the world carrying 
on its commercial pursuits would act as an ef- 
fective suasion to the nation blockaded long be- 
fore any question of physical suffering had begun 
to arise. But there is a more decisive considera- 
tion than that. One of the greatest assets of the 
League of Nations would be the accurate informa- 
tion its statistical and economic sections would 
possess on the actual and potential resources of 



And Now — f 205 

any individual country. It would be a perfectly 
simple matter to allocate to any blockaded nation 
a bare subsistence ration, and no more than a sub- 
sistence ration, without seriously impairing the 
pressure loss of trade and the breach of all com- 
munications and external intercourse would ef- 
fect. 

But the economic power of the League of Na- 
tions promises to figure far more largely in pro- 
moting the welfare than in repressing the am- 
bitions or obduracies of nations. Something of 
what a world organisation for the purchase and 
distribution of necessities), and the consequent 
stabilisation of price and supply, can effect has 
been seen in the operations of the Supreme Eco- 
nomic Council in the later months of the armis- 
tice period. That Council has developed from 
an Allied into an International body, and it is 
inevitable that it should become rapidly, if not 
immediately, an integral part of the League of 
Nations. The field is already more than ripe for 
its labours. The outstanding feature of the Euro- 
pean situation to-day is famine. That is the di- 
rect outcome of war and blockade, but it may be 
years before the situation is normal. There is too 
much truth in the representations of Count Brock- 
dorff-Rantzau to M. Clemenceau, and of Dr. Ren- 
ner at St. Germain, to justify the hope of any 
return to conditions of sufficiency in Germany and 
Austria. That is as true of coal and other raw ma- 
terials as of the prime necessity of corn. Unless 
the world as a whole is content to stand by and 



206 The Peace in the Making 

see part of the world die — as it is showing to its 
credit to-day that it is not — some system of world 
regulation of supply and distribution must be 
instituted. The foundations of such a system have 
been laid. Plans for its development are in be- 
ing. It will involve the association of the whole 
world in the League, but that is a condition likely 
soon to be fulfilled. A body that can regulate 
supply for the general welfare, and at the same 
time if necessity arise cut off supply altogether 
as a means of concerted pressure, should have 
small need to rely on purely military sanctions. 

There is indeed one further objection to meet, 
but it hardly needs serious refutation. The 
League, it is suggested, controlled by the repre- 
sentatives of capitalist governments, may become 
an omnipotent engine of reaction. The answer 
to that criticism is clear. The League will be 
what the nations composing it make it. And 
the nations constituting the Council of the League 
with hardly an exception enjoy a thoroughly dem- 
ocratic franchise. If they choose to elect capi- 
talists to represent them, whom have they but 
themselves to thank for what comes of it 1 Criti- 
cism of that order involves the assumption that 
it is the worst in the present that will determine 
the future. The League of Nations is built on 
the faith that it is out of the best of to-day that 
to-morrow will be shaped. 



Appendix I 
THE GERMAN TREATY 
1.— THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS. 

Covenant of League to be accepted in full. 

2.— BOUNDARIES OF GERMANY. 

German frontiers to be redrawn on lines required by 
cession of territory to France, Poland, Belgium, and 
(if so determined by plebiscite) to Denmark. 

3.— THE NEW EUROPE. 

(a) BELGIUM. 

Small areas round Moresnet, Eupen, and Montmedy 
to be acquired from Germany, with right in two latter 
cases of protest to League of Nations. Treaties of 1839 
to be abrogated. 

(6) LUXEMBURG. 
To be withdrawn from German Zollverein. 

(c) LEFT BANK OF RHINE. 
To be completely demilitarised. 

(d) SAAR VALLEY. 

Certain defined area, with mines therein contained, 
to be transferred to France in compensation for loss of 
coal supply from Northern France and in part payment 
of reparation under other heads. Government by 
Commission of five members, three appointed by League 
of Nations, one by inhabitants, and one by France. 
Population to declare by plebiscite after fifteen years 
in favour of union with Germany, union with France, 
or continuance of status quo. In event of union with 
Germany, mines to be repurchased by Germany from 
France. 

(e) ALSACE-LORRAINE. 

To be transferred wholesale to France free of war 
debts. 

207 



208 Appendix I 



(/) GERMAN-AUSTRIA. 

Complete independence to be recognised by Germany, 
as inalienable without consent of Council of League of 
Nations. 

(g) CZECHO-SLOVAKIA. 

Germany to recognise complete independence and to 
accept frontiers as they may subsequently be deter- 
mined. 

(h) POLAND. 

Germany to cede most of Posen, and West Prussia. 
Future of Upper Silesia to be determined by plebiscite. 

(j) EAST PRUSSIA. 

To be severed from rest of Germany. Southern and 
eastern frontiers to be fixed by plebiscite. Reciprocal 
freedom of communication to north and south for Poles 
across German territory, and to east and west for Ger- 
mans across Polish territory. District about Mendel to 
be ceded to Associated Powers for subsequent disposi- 
tion. 

(k) DANTZIG. 

To be Free City under guarantee of League of Na- 
tions within Polish Customs Union. 

(0 DENMARK. 

Self-determination by plebiscite for Northern Schles- 
wig and portions of Central Schleswig. 

(m) HELIGOLAND. 
To be defortified, and kept unfortified, by Germany. 

(») RUSSIA. 

Germany to recognise full independence of all terri- 
tories included in former Russian Empire, to accept an- 
nulment of Brest-Litovsk Treaty and other agreements 
concluded since November, 1917, and to admit right of 
Russia to restitution and reparation on principles em- 
bodied in present Treaty. 



Appendix I 209 

4.— EXTEA-EUROPEAN TERRITORIES. 

(a) GENERAL. 

Germany to renounce all rights in her own and her 
Allies' territories in favour of Associated Powers. 

(&) CHINA. 

Germany to renounce in favour of China all claim to 
further payments of Boxer Indemnity and all rights and 
concessions in Chinese territory other than Kiao-Chau. 

(c) SHANTUNG. 

Germany to renounce in favour of Japan all rights as 
to Kiao-Chau and as to mines, railroads, and cables in 
Shantung. 

(d) SIAM, LIBERIA AND MOROCCO. 
Germany to renounce all rights. 

(e) EGYPT. 

Germany to recognise British Protectorate declared 
in December, 1914. 

(/) TURKEY AND BULGARIA. 

Germany to accept decisions of Associated Powers 
with regard to all rights and property of her nationals 
in these countries. 

5.— NAVAL, MILITARY AND AIR. 

(a) GENERAL. 

Germany to be disarmed in accordance with decisions 
already announced. 

(b) MILITARY. 

Army to be restricted by March, 1920, to 100,000 men 
recruited voluntarily on basis of twelve years' service. 
No General Staff. Production, type, and maintenance 
of armaments to conform to prescribed limitations. Belt 
of 50 kilometres on East Bank of Rhine to be demili- 
tarised. 



210 Appendix I 



(c) NAVAL. 

Navy to be limited to six battleships, six light cruis- 
ers, twelve destroyers, and twelve torpedo-boats, and 
personnel of 15,000, all volunteers. All other vessels 
to be surrendered. No submarines to be built. No for- 
tifications in Baltic. Fourteen submarine cables to be 
surrendered. 

(d) AIR. 

No military aeroplanes or dirigibles to be retained or 
constructed. No aircraft of any kind to be manufac- 
tured for six months. 

6.— PRISONERS OF WAR. 

Repatriation to be carried out by Commission of rep- 
resentatives of Allies and of German Government. 

7.— RESPONSIBILITIES. 

(a) WILHELM II. 

Kaiser's surrender to be requested from Dutch Gov- 
ernment with a view to trial by Tribunal of five Judges, 
one from each of five Greater Allied Powers. 

(6) OTHER OFFENDERS. 

Persons accused of violation of laws and customs of 
war to be tried by special military tribunals. 

8.— REPARATION AND RESTITUTION. 

(a) MONEY PAYMENTS. 

Germany to admit responsibility for all damage fall- 
ing under ten specified heads, her total obligation being 
determined and notified not later than May 1, 1921, by 
an Inter-Allied Commission. Liquidation to extend 
over thirty years, and to be payable on account in in- 
stalments of 

(1) £1,000,000,000 by May, 1921. 

(2) £2,000,000,000 by 1926; and 

(3) £2,000,000,000 after 1926. 



Appendix I 21 1 

Germany to issue at once Five per cent. Gold Bonds 
falling due in 1926, for the repayment of all sums bor- 
rowed by Belgium from her Allies up to the date of the 
armistice. 

(6) SHIPPING. 

Germany to cede to Allies all her merchant ships over 
1,600 tons, half her ships between 1,600 and 1,000 tons, 
and one quarter of her trawlers and other fishing ves- 
sels, and further, to build ships for Allies to amount of 
200,000 tons a year for five years. 

(c) COAL, ETC. 

Germany to make certain prescribed deliveries of 
coal, benzol, coal-tar, and sulphate of ammonia to 
France for a period of ten years, and to grant options 
of additional coal deliveries during the same period to 
France, Belgium, and Italy. 

(d) BELGIAN ART TREASURES. 

Germany to hand over manuscripts, early printed 
books, etc., to the equivalent of those destroyed in the 
Library of Louvain, and to restore certain other art 
treasures now in Berlin. 

9.— FINANCE. 

No part of Germany's pre-war debt to be charged 
against Alsace-Lorraine or Poland. In other cases 
Power to which German territory is ceded to bear due 
proportion of such debt. Germany to bear full cost 
of armies of occupation from date of armistice onwards. 

10.— ECONOMIC. 

No tariff discrimination against Allied trade for five 
years. 

All Allied vessels to enjoy most-favoured-nation treat- 
ment for five years. 

No unfair competition with Allied trade. 

Clearing offices for dealing with pre-war debts to be 
established in Germany and all Allied countries. 

Allies to have right to liquidate all German property 
within their territory. 



212 Appendix I 

11.— AERIAL NAVIGATION. 

Allied aviators to have equal rights with German in 
respect of passage over and landing on German terri- 
tory. 

12.— PORTS, WATERWAYS AND RAIL- 
WAYS. 

(a) FREEDOM OF TRANSIT. 

Germany to grant unrestricted freedom of transit for 
Allied goods through German territory, and free zones 
in German ports to be maintained. 

(b) INTERNATIONAL RIVERS. 

Parts of Elbe, Oder, Niemen, and Danube to be 
internationalised. 

(c) NEW CANAL SYSTEMS. 

Germany to share, if required, in construction of 
Rhine-Danube and Rhine-Meuse Canals. 

(d) KIEL CANAL. 

To be open on terms of equality to warships and mer- 
chant vessels of all nationalities. 

13.— LABOUR CONVENTION. 

Provisions of Labour Convention to be accepted in 

full. 

14.— GUARANTEES. 

All German territory on left bank of Rhine, together 
with bridgeheads, to be occupied by Allies for fifteen 
years, being evacuated by stages as instalments of in- 
demnity are paid off. In the event of Germany refus- 
ing, either during or after the fifteen years, to observe 
all or part of her obligations as to Reparation the 
whole or part of the areas scheduled to be re-occupied 
immediately. 



Appendix I 213 

15.— MISCELLANEOUS. 

(a) VALIDITY OF TREATIES. 

Germany to recognise the present Treaty and all 
subsequent agreements between her former Allies and 
the Associated Powers, and to recognise all new States 
and the frontiers assigned to them. 

(6) RELIGIOUS MISSIONS. 

Work of German missions in territory of Allied or 
Associated Powers to be continued under trustees ap- 
pointed by those Powers. 

16.— RATIFICATION. 

Treaty to come into force, as between Powers that 
have ratified, on draft of a proces-verbal recording de- 
posit of ratifications by Germany on the one hand and 
any three of the Principal Allied and Associated Pow- 
ers on the other. 



\ 



Appendix II 
THE AUSTRIAN TREATY 
1.— LEAGUE OF NATIONS. 

Covenant of League to be accepted in full. 

2.— BOUNDARIES OF AUSTRIA. 

(a) Austrian Frontiers to be redrawn on lines neces- 
sitated by severance of Austria and Hungary, grant 
of independence to Czecho-Slovakia and the Serb-Croat- 
Slovene State, and cession of territory to Italy and to 
the Allied and Associated Powers. 

(b) CZECHO-SLOVAKIA. 

Austria to recognise full independence. Czecho-Slo- 
vakia to undertake to protect racial minorities. 

(c) SERB-CROAT-SLOVENE STATE. 

Austria to recognise full independence. Serb-Croat- 
Slovene State to undertake to protect racial minorities. 
Klagenfurt area to decide by plebiscite between Austria 
and Serb-Croat-Slovene State. 

(d) POLAND. 

Similar provisions as to recognition of independence 
and reciprocal protection of racial minorities. 

(e) HUNGARY. 

Similar provisions. 

(/) RUSSIA. 

Austria to accept complete annulment of Brest-Li- 
tovsk Treaty to recognise full independence of all terri- 
tories formerly part of Russian Empire, and to admit 
right of Russia to reparation and restitution on basis 
of present Treaty. 

(g) GALICIA. 

To be transferred to Allies for subsequent disposal in 
accordance with plebiscite. 

(h) ITALY. 

Trentino, Southern Tyrol and Trieste Peninsula to be 
transferred to Italian sovereignty. 
214 



Appendix II 215 

3.— PROTECTION OF MINORITIES. 

General undertaking to be given covering legal and 
religious equality and freedom of language. 

4.— NAVAL AND MILITARY. 

Navy and Air Forces to disappear. Army limited to 
30,000, all on voluntary enlistment. 

5.— RESPONSIBILITIES. 

Surrender of persons guilty of war-crimes required 
as in case of Germany. 

6.— REPARATION. 

Austria to make good damage to civilian person and 
property under certain specified categories. Allied 
Reparation Commission to assess payments to be made 
annually for thirty years from 1921, also payment to be 
made in money and material prior to 1921. All 
merchant shipping to be surrendered as contribution to- 
wards reparation. 

7.— RESTITUTION. 

All property, including cash, sequestrated by Austria 
to be restored where identifiable or where seizure can 
be proved. Artistic, scientific and historic collections 
previously the property of Crown or State to be inalien- 
able for twenty years except by special arrangement. 

8.— FINANCE. 

Austrian public (pre-war) debt to be distributed, on 
basis approved by Reparation Commission, among new 
States to which former Austro-Hungarian territory is 
transferred. New States to assume possession of any 
property within their borders belonging to Austrian 
Crown or former Austro-Hungarian Government, mak- 
ing such payment on basis approved by Reparation 
Commission, such payment to rank as Austrian contri- 
bution towards reparation. 



216 Appendix II 

9.— POETS, WATERWAYS AND RAIL- 
WAYS. 

(a) Provisions follow substantially those of German 
Treaty. 

(6) Austria to have unfettered access to Adriatic and 
to grant Czecho-Slovakia similar access over Austrian 
territory to Fiume and Trieste. 

(c) Danube from Ulm to area of jurisdiction of Dan- 
ube Commission to be internationalised. Austria to be 
deprived of representation on Danube Commission. 

10.— LABOUR CONVENTION. 

Provisions of Labour Convention to be accepted in full. 

11.— RELATIONS WITH GERMANY. 

No union with Germany to be effected without con- 
sent of Council of League of Nations. 



Appendix III 

COUNT BROCKDORFF-RANTZAU ON THE 
GERMAN TREATY. 

Letter addressed to the President of the Peace Conference 
under date May 13th f 1919. 

Sir, — In accordance with my note of May 9th, I beg to 
forward the following observations of the economic Commission 
charged with studying the effects of the proposed terms of 
peace on the condition of the population of Germany. 

In the course of the last two generations, Germany has 
changed from an agricultural State to an industrial. The ag- 
ricultural State could feed forty million men. As an indus- 
trial State Germany was capable of ensuring the support of 
sixty-seven millions. In 1913, imports of foodstuffs amounted 
to about 12,000,000 tons. Before the war, about 15,000,000 
men in Germany were dependent directly or indirectly on for- 
eign trade and the shipping industry, being employed on work- 
ing up raw material from abroad. 

According to the provisions of the Peace Treaty, Germany 
must surrender all her commercial shipping fit for overseas 
trade and all vessels newly completed. Moreover for the next 
five years her yards must be devoted in the first instance to 
construction for the Allies and Associated Governments. In 
addition Germany is to lose her colonies. The whole of her 
possessions are to fall into the hands of the Allied and Asso- 
ciated Governments, are to serve in part to meet the indemnity 
demands, are to be put into liquidation, and are to be submit- 
ted to whatever economic measures the Allies may see fit to im- 
pose in time of peace. 

By the operation of the territorial clauses of the Peace 
Treaty an important part of the cereal and potato producing 
area in the east will be lost. That will mean the disappearance 
of twenty-one per cent, of Germany's home-grown supplies 
of these commodities. Our productivity in foodstuffs will un- 
dergo a further diminution. First of all the importation of 
certain raw materials for the German fertiliser industry will 
be restricted, and in addition that industry and others will be 
handicapped by coal shortage, for the Peace Treaty provides 
that we must lose almost a third of our coal output, while huge 
deliveries of coal are imposed on us for the next ten years. 
More than that, according to the Peace Treaty, Germany must 
cede to her neighbours almost three-fourths of her steel output, 
and more than three-fifths of her zinc output. 

217 



218 Appendix III 

After such a limitation of her own output, after this eco- 
nomic handicap resulting from the loss of coal, of her merchant 
shipping and of her overseas possessions Germany will no 
longer be in a position to obtain adequate raw materials from 
abroad. At the same time her need for food imports will have 
sensibly increased. As a consequence Germany will soon find 
herself incapable of providing work and food for the millions 
who live on imported goods and commerce. These millions 
must then emigrate from Germany. But that is technically im- 
possible, for many of the important States of the world will 
take definite steps to prohibit German immigration. More than 
that, hundreds of thousands of Germans hailing from countries 
at war with Germany or from the districts to be ceded will 
pour into Germany. If the terms of peace are carried out it 
means literally condemning millions of people in Germany 
to death, and that so much the more swiftly in that the health 
of the people has been completely undermined by the blockade, 
which was actually sharpened during the armistice period. 

No relief enterprise, on whatever scale and however perma- 
nent, will be capable of setting a term to this sacrifice. Peace 
will require of the German people more than four-and-a-half 
years of war in human sacrifice (a million-and-a-quarter killed 
in battle and more than a million victims of the blockade). 
We cannot but question whether the delegates of the Allied and 
Associated Allies have realised the consequences that must 
inevitably ensue if Germany, which is to-day thickly populated, 
united economically with the whole world, a prosperous indus- 
trial country, is reduced to a stage of development correspond- 
ing to its economic situation and population of half a century 
ago. 

The man who signs the Peace Treaty will be pronouncing 
the death sentence of millions of men, women and children of 
Germany. 

Before submitting other details, I deem it my duty to lay 
before the delegations of the Allied and Associated countries 
these considerations in regard to the effect of the Peace Treaty 
on the problem of German population. If it is desired statis- 
tical proofs can be supplied. 

I am, Sir, etc., 



Appendix IV 

GENERAL SMUTS ON THE GERMAN 
TREATY 

I have signed the Peace Treaty, not because I consider it a 
satisfactory document, but because it is imperatively necessary 
to close the war; because the world needs peace above all, and 
nothing could be more fatal than the continuance of the state 
of suspense between war and peace. The months since the 
armistice was signed have perhaps been as upsetting, unset- 
tling, and ruinous to Europe as the previous four years of 
war. I look upon the Peace Treaty as the close of those two 
chapters of war and armistice, and only on that ground do I 
agree to it. 

I say this now, not in criticism, but in faith; not because I 
wish to find fault with the work done, but rather because I 
feel that in the Treaty we have not yet achieved the real peace 
to which our peoples were looking, and because I feel that the 
real work of making peace will only begin after this Treaty has 
been signed, and a definite halt has thereby been called to the 
destructive passions that have been desolating Europe for 
nearly five years. This Treaty is simply the liquidation of the 
war situation in the world. 

The promise of the new life, the victory of the great human 
ideals, for which the peoples have shed their blood and their 
treasure without stint, the fulfilment of their aspirations to- 
wards a new international order and a fairer, better world are 
not written in this Treaty, and will not be written in treaties. 
"Not in this mountain, nor in Jerusalem, but in spirit and in 
truth," as the Great Master said, must the foundations of the 
new order be laid. A new heart must be given, not only to our 
enemies, but also to us; a contrite spirit for the woes which 
have overwhelmed the world ; a spirit of pity, mercy, and for- 
giveness for the sins and wrongs which we have suffered. A 
new spirit of generosity and humanity, born in the hearts of 
the peoples in this great hour of common suffering and sor- 
row, can alone heal the wounds which have been inflicted on the 
body of Christendom. 

And this new spirit among the peoples will be the solvent 
for the problems which the statesmen have found too hard at 
the Conference. 

There are territorial settlements which will need revision. 
There are guarantees laid down, which we all hope will soon 
be found out of harmony with the new peaceful temper and 

219 



220 Appendix IV 

unarmed state of our former enemies. There are punishments 
fore-shadowed, over most of which a calmer mood may yet 
prefer to pass the sponge of oblivion. There are indemnities 
stipulated, which cannot be exacted without grave injury to the 
industrial revival of Europe, and which it will be in the inter- 
ests of all to render more tolerable and moderate. 

There are numerous pin-pricks, which will cease to pain un- 
der the healing influences of the new international atmosphere. 
The real peace of the peoples ought to follow, complete, and 
amend the peace of the statesmen. 

In this Treaty, however, two achievements of far-reaching 
importance for the world are definitely recorded. The one is 
the destruction of Prussian militarism, the other is the institu- 
tion of the League of Nations. I am confident the League 
of Nations will yet prove the path of escape for Europe out of 
the ruin brought about by this war. 

But the League is as yet only a form. It still requires the 
quickening life, which can only come from the active interest 
and the vitalising contact of the peoples themselves. The new 
creative spirit, which is once more moving among the peoples 
in their anguish, must fill the institution with life and with 
inspiration for the pacific ideals born of this war, and so con- 
vert it into a real instrument of progress. In that way the 
abolition of militarism, in this Treaty unfortunately confined to 
the enemy, may soon come, as a blessing and relief to the Allied 
peoples as well. 

And the enemy peoples should at the earliest possible date 
join the League, and in collaboration with the Allied peoples 
learn to practise the great lesson of this war — that not in sep- 
arate ambitions or in selfish domination but in common service 
for the great human causes lies the true path of national prog- 
ress. 

This joint collaboration is especially necessary to-day for 
the reconstruction of a ruined and broken world. The war 
has resulted not only in the utter defeat of the enemy armies, 
but has gone immeasurably further. We witness the collapse 
of the whole political and economic fabric of Central and East- 
ern Europe. Unemployment, starvation, anarchy, war, disease, 
and despair stalk through the land. 

Unless the victors can effectively extend a helping hand to 
the defeated and broken peoples, a large part of Europe is 
threatened with exhaustion and decay. Russia has already 
walked into the night, and the risk that the rest may follow 
is very grave indeed. The effects of this disaster would not be 



Appendix IF 221 

confined to Central and Eastern Europe. For civilisation is 
one body, and we are all members of one another. 
^ A supreme necessity is laid on all to grapple with this situa- 
tion. And in the joint work of beneficence the old feuds will 
tend to be forgotten, the roots of reconciliation among the 
peoples will begin to grow again, and ultimately flower into 
active, fruitful, lasting peace. 

To the peoples of the United States and the British Empire, 
who have been exceptionally blessed with the good things of 
life, I would make a special appeal. Let them exert themselves 
to the utmost in this great work of saving the wreckage of life 
and industry on the Continent of Europe. They have a great 
mission, and in fulfilling it they will be as much blessed as 
blessing. 

All this is possible, and I hope capable, of accomplishment; 
but only on two conditions. In the first place, the Germans 
must convince our peoples of their good faith, of their complete 
sincerity through a real honest effort to fulfil their obligations 
under the Treaty to the extent of their ability. They will find 
the British people disposed to meet them half-way in their 
unexampled difficulties and perplexities. But any resort to 
subterfuges or to underhand means to defeat or evade the 
Peace Treaty will only revive old suspicions and arouse anger 
and prove fatal to a good understanding. 

And, in the second place, our Allied peoples must remember 
that God gave them overwhelming victory — victory far beyond 
their greatest dreams, not for small selfish ends, not for finan- 
cial or economic advantages, but for the attainment of the 
great human ideals, for which our heroes gave their lives, and 
which are the real victors in this war of ideals. 



Appendix V 

THE COVENANT OF THE LEAGUE OF 
NATIONS 



The High Contracting Parties, 

In order to promote international eo-operation and to achieve 
international peace and security 

by the acceptance of obligations not to resort to war, 
by the prescription of open, just and honourable relations 

between nations, 
by the firm establishment of the understandings of inter- 
national law as the actual rule of conduct among Gov- 
ernments, and 
by the maintenance of justice and a scrupulous respect 
for all treaty obligations in the dealings of organised 
peoples with one another, 
Agree to this Covenant of the League of Nations. 



ARTICLE 1. 

The original Members of the League of Nations shall be those 
of the Signatories which are named in the Annex to this Cove- 
nant and also such of those other States named in the Annex as 
shall accede without reservation to this Covenant. Such acces- 
sion shall be effected by a Declaration deposited with the Sec- 
retariat within two months of the coming into force of the 
Covenant. Notice thereof shall be sent to all other members 
of the League. 

Any fully self-governing State, Dominion, or Colony not 
named in the Annex may become a Member of the League if its 



Appendix V 223 

admission is agreed to by two-thirds of the Assembly, provided 
that it shall give effective guarantees of its sincere intention to 
observe its international obligations, and shall accept such regu- 
lations as may be prescribed by the League in regard to its 
military, naval and air forces and armaments. 

Any Member of the League may, after two years' notice of 
its intention so to do, withdraw from the League, provided that 
all its international obligations and all its obligations under 
this Covenant shall have been fulfilled at the time of its with- 
drawal. 

ARTICLE 2. 

The action of the League under this Covenant shall be ef- 
fected through the instrumentality of an Assembly and of a 
Council with a permanent Secretariat. 

ARTICLE 3. 

The Assembly shall consist of Representatives of the Mem- 
bers of the League. 

The Assembly shall meet at stated intervals and from time to 
time as occasion may require at the Seat of the League or at 
such other place as may be decided upon. 

The Assembly may deal at its meetings with any matter 
within the sphere of action of the League or affecting the peace 
of the world. 

At meetings of the Assembly each Member of the League 
shall have one vote, and may not have more than three Repre- 
sentatives. 

ARTICLE 4. 

The Council shall consist of Representatives of the Principal 
Allied and Associated Powers, together with Representatives of 
four other Members of the League. These four Members of 
the League shall be selected by the Assembly from time to time 
in its discretion. Until the appointment of the Representatives 
of the four Members of the League first selected by the Assem- 
bly, Representatives of Belgium, Brazil, Spain and Greece, shall 
be members of the Council. 



224 Appendix V 

With the approval of the majority of the Assembly, the 
Council may name additional Members of the League whose 
Representatives shall always be Members of the Council; the 
Council, with like approval, may increase the number of Mem- 
bers of the League to be selected by the Assembly for repre- 
sentation on the Council. 

The Council shall meet from time to time, as occasion may 
require, and at least once a year, at the Seat of the League, 
or at such other place as may be decided upon. The Council 
may deal at its meetings with any matter within the sphere of 
action of the League, or affecting the peace of the world. 

Any Member of the League not represented on the Council 
shall be invited to send a Representative to sit as a member at 
any meeting of the Council during the consideration of mat- 
ters specially affecting the interests of that Member of the 
League. 

At meetings of the Council, each Member of the League 
represented on the Council shall have one vote, and may not 
have more than one Representative. 



ARTICLE 5. 

Except where otherwise expressly provided in this Cove- 
nant, or by the terms of the present Treaty, decisions at any 
meeting of the Assembly or of the Council shall require the 
agreement of all the Members of the League represented at the 
meeting. 

All matters of procedure at meetings of the Assembly or of 
the Council, including the appointment of Committees to in- 
vestigate particular matters, shall be regulated by the Assembly 
or by the Council, and may be decided by a majority of the 
Members of the League represented at the meeting. 

The first meeting of the Assembly and the first meeting of 
the Council shall be summoned by the President of the United 
States of America. 

ARTICLE 6. 

The permanent Secretariat shall be established at the Seat 
of the League. The Secretariat shall comprise a Secretary- 
General and such secretaries and staff as may be required. 



Appendix V 225 

The first Secretary-General shall be the person named in the 
Annex ; thereafter the Secretary-General shall be appointed by 
the Council with the approval of the majority of the Assembly. 

The Secretaries and staff of the Secretariat shall be ap- 
pointed by the Secretary-General with the approval of the 
Council. 

The Secretary-General shall act in that capacity at all meet- 
ings of the Assembly and of the Council. 

The expenses of the Secretariat shall be borne by the Mem- 
bers of the League in accordance with the apportionment of the 
expenses of the International Bureau of the Universal Postal 
Union. 

ARTICLE 7. 

The Seat of the League is established at Geneva, 

The Council may at any time decide that the Seat of the 
League shall be established elsewhere. 

All positions under or connected with the League, including 
the Secretariat, shall be open equally to men and women. 

Representatives of the Members of the League and officials 
of the League, when engaged on the business of the League 
shall enjoy diplomatic privileges and immunities. 

The buildings and other property occupied by the League or 
its officials, or by Representatives attending its meetings, shaH 
be inviolable. 

ARTICLE 8. 

The Members of the League recognise that the maintenance 
of peace requires the reduction of national armaments to the 
lowest point consistent with national safety and the enforce- 
ment by common action of international obligations. 

The Council, taking account of the geographical situation 
and circumstances of each State, shall formulate plans for such 
reduction for the consideration and action of the several Gov- 
ernments. 

Such plans shall be subject to reconsideration and revision at 
least every ten years. 



226 Appendix V 

After these plans shall have been adopted by the several 
Governments, the limits of armaments therein fixed shall not be 
exceeded without the concurrence of the Council. 

The Members of the League agree that the manufacture by 
private enterprise of munitions and implements of war is open 
to grave objections. The Council shall advise how the evil 
effects attendant upon such manufacture can be prevented, due 
regard being had to the necessities of those Members of the 
League which are not able to manufacture the munitions and 
implements of war necessary for their safety. 

The Members of the League undertake to interchange full 
and frank information as to the scale of their armaments, 
their military, naval and air programmes, and the condition 
of such of their industries as are adaptable to warlike purposes. 



ARTICLE 9. 

A permanent Commission shall be constituted to advise the 
Council on the execution of the provisions of Articles I. and 
VIIL, and on military, naval and air questions generally. 



ARTICLE 10. 

The Members of the League undertake to respect and pre- 
serve as against external aggression the territorial integrity 
and existing political independence of all Members of the 
League. In case of any such aggression, or in case of any 
threat or danger of such aggression, the Council shall advise 
upon the means by which this obligation shall be fulfilled. 



ARTICLE 11. 

Any war, or threat of war, whether immediately affecting 
any of the Members of the League or not, is hereby declared 
a matter of concern to the whole League, and the League shall 
take any action that may be deemed wise and effectual to safe- 
guard the peace of nations. In ease any such emergency should 
arise, the Secretary-General shall, on the request of any Mem- 
ber of the League, forthwith summon a meeting of the Council. 



Appendix V 227 

It is also declared to be the friendly right of each Member of 
the League to bring to the attention of the Assembly or of the 
Council any circumstance whatever affecting international re- 
lations which threatens to disturb international peace or the 
good understanding between nations upon which peace de- 
pends. 

ARTICLE 12. 

The Members of the League agree that if there should arise 
between them any dispute likely to lead to a rupture, they will 
submit the matter either to arbitration or to inquiry by the 
Council, and they agree in no case to resort to war until three 
months after the award by the arbitrators or the report by the 
Council. 

In any case under this Article, the award of the arbitrators 
shall be made within a reasonable time, and the report of the 
Council shall be made within six months after the submission 
of the dispute. 

ARTICLE 13. 

The Members of the League agree that whenever any dispute 
shall arise between them which they recognise to be suitable for 
submission to arbitration, and which cannot be satisfactorily 
settled by diplomacy, they will submit the whole subject mat- 
ter to arbitration. 

Disputes as to the interpretation of a treaty, as to any ques- 
tion of international law, as to the existence of any fact which, 
if established, would constitute a breach of any international 
obligation, or as to the extent and nature of the reparation to 
be made for any such breach, are declared to be among those 
which are generally suitable for submission to arbitration. 

For the consideration of any such dispute the Court of arbi- 
tration to which the case is referred shall be the Court agreed 
on by the parties to the dispute, or stipulated in any conven- 
tion existing between them. 

The Members of the League agree that they will carry out 
in full good faith any award that may be rendered, and that 
they will not resort to war against a Member of the League 
which complies therewith. In the event of any failure to carry 



228 Appendix V 

out such an award the Council shall propose what steps should 
be taken to give effect thereto. 



ARTICLE 14. 

The Council shall formulate and submit to the Members of 
the League for adoption plans for the establishment of a Per- 
manent Court of International Justice. The Court shall be 
competent to hear and determine any dispute of an Interna- 
tional character which the parties thereto submit to it. The 
Court may also give an advisory opinion upon any dispute or 
question referred to it by the Council or by the Assembly. 



ARTICLE 15. 

If there should arise between Membei's of the League any 
dispute likely to lead to a rupture, which is not submitted to 
arbitration 'in accordance with Article 13, the Members of the 
League agree that they will submit the matter to the Council. 
Any party to the dispute may effect such submission by giving 
notice of the existence of the dispute to the Secretary-General, 
who will make all necessary arrangements for a full investiga- 
tion and consideration thereof. 

For this purpose the parties to the dispute will communi- 
cate to the Secretary-General, as promptly as possible, state- 
ments of their case with all the relevant facts and papers, and 
the Council may forthwith direct the publication thereof. 

The Council shall endeavour to effect a settlement of the 
dispute, and if such efforts are successful, a statement shall be 
made public giving such facts and explanations regarding the 
dispute and the terms of settlement thereof as the Council may 
deem appropriate. 

If the dispute is not thus settled, the Council, either unani- 
mously or by a majority vote, shall make and publish a report 
containing a statement of the facts of the dispute, and the 
recommendations which are deemed just and proper in regard 
thei'eto. 

Any Member of the League represented on the Council may 
make public a statement of the facts of the dispute and of 
its conclusions regarding the same. 






Appendix V 229 

If a report by the Council is unanimously agreed to by the 
members thereof other than the Representatives of one or more 
of the parties to the dispute, the Members of the League agree 
that they will not go to war with any party to the dispute 
which complies with the recommendations of the report. 

If the Council fails to reach a report which is unanimously 
agreed to by the members thereof, other than the Representa- 
tives of one or more of the parties to the dispute, the Members 
of the League reserve to themselves the right to take such ac- 
tion as they shall consider necessary for the maintenance of 
right and justice. 

If the dispute between the parties is claimed by one of them, 
and is found by the Council to arise out of a matter which by 
international law is solely within the domestic jurisdiction of 
that party, the council shall so report, and shall make no rec- 
ommendation as to its settlement. 

The Council may in any case under this Article refer the dis- 
pute to the Assembly. The dispute shall be so referred at the 
request of either party to the dispute, provided that such re- 
quest be made within fourteen days after the submission of 
the dispute to the Council. 

In any case referred to the Assembly, all the provisions of 
this Article and of Article 12 relating to the action and powers 
of the Council, shall apply to the action and powers of the 
Assembly, provided that a report made by the Assembly, if 
concurred in by the Representatives of those Members of the 
League represented on the Council and of a majority of the 
other Members of the League, exclusive in each case of the 
Representatives of the parties to the dispute, shall have the 
same force as a report by the Council concurred in by all the 
members thereof other than the Representatives of one or more 
of the parties to the dispute. 



ARTICLE 16. 

Should any Member of the League resort to war in disregard 
of its covenants under Articles 12, 13, or 15, it shall ipso facto 
be deemed to have committed an act of war against all other 
Members of the League, which hereby undertake immediately 
to subject it to the severance of all trade or financial relations, 
the prohibition of all intercourse between their nationals and 



230 Appendix V 

the nationals of the covenant-breaking State, and the preven- 
tion of all financial, commercial, or personal intercourse be- 
tween the nationals of the covenant-breaking State and the na- 
tionals of any other State, whether a Member of the League* 
or not. 

It shall be the duty of the Council in such ease to recom- 
mend to the several Governments concerned what effective mili- 
tary, naval or air force the Members of the League shall sev- 
erally contribute to the armed forces to be used to protect the 
covenants of the League. 

The Members of the League agree, further, that they will 
mutually support one another in the financial and economic 
measures which are taken under this Article, in order to mini- 
mise the loss and inconvenience resulting from the above 
measures, and that they will mutually support one another 
in resisting any special measures aimed at one of their number 
by the covenant-breaking State, and that they will take the 
necessary steps to afford passage through their territory to the 
forces of any of the Members of the League which are co-oper- 
ating to protect the covenants of the League. 

Any Member of the League which has violated any covenant 
of the League may be declared to be no longer a Member of 
the League by a vote of the Council concurred in by the Rep- 
resentatives of all the other Members of the League represented 
thereon. 



ARTICLE 17. 



In the event of a dispute between a Member of the League 
and a State which is not a Member of the League, or between 
States not Members of the League, the State or States not 
Members of the League shall be invited to accept the obliga- 
tions of membership in the League for the purposes of such 
dispute, upon such conditions as the Council may deem just. 
If such invitation is accepted, the provisions of Articles 12 to 
16 inclusive shall be applied with such modification as may 
be deemed necessary by the Council. 

Upon such invitation being given the Council shall immedi- 
ately institute an inquiry into the circumstances of the dispute, 



Appendix V 231 

and recommend such action as may seem best and most effec- 
tual in the circumstances. 

If a State so invited shall refuse to accept the obligations of 
membership in the League for the purposes of such dispute, 
and shall resort to war against a Member of the League, the 
provisions of Article 16 shall be applicable as against the State 
taking such action. 

If both parties to the dispute when so invited refuse to ac- 
cept the obligations of membership in the League for the pur- 
poses of such dispute, the Council may take such measures 
and make such recommendations as will prevent hostilities and 
will result in the settlement of the dispute. 



ARTICLE 18. 

Every treaty or international engagement entered into here- 
after by any Member of the League shall be forthwith regis- 
tered with the Secretariat and shall as soon as possible be pub- 
lished by it. No such treaty or international engagement shall 
be binding until so registered. 

ARTICLE 19. 

The Assembly may from time to time advise the reconsidera- 
tion by Members of the League of treaties which have become 
inapplicable and the consideration of international conditions 
whose continuance might endanger the peace of the world. 

ARTICLE 20. 

The Members of the League severally agree that this Cove- 
nant is accepted as abrogating all obligations or understand- 
ings inter se which are inconsistent with the terms thereof, and 
solemnly undertake that they will not thereafter enter into any 
engagements inconsistent with the terms thereof. 

In case any Member of the League shall, before becoming 
a Member of the League, have undertaken any obligations in- 
consistent with the terms of this Covenant, it shall be the duty 
of such Member to take immediate steps to procure its release 
from such obligations. 



232 Appendix V 

ARTICLE 21. 

Nothing in this Covenant shall be deemed to affect the valid- 
ity of international engagements, such as treaties of arbitra- 
tion or regional understandings like the Monroe doctrine, for 
securing the maintenance of peace. 

ARTICLE 22. 

To those colonies and territories which as a consequence of 
the late war have ceased to be under the sovereignty of the 
States which formerly governed them and which are inhabited 
by peoples not yet able to stand by themselves under the 
strenuous conditions of the modem world, there should be ap- 
plied the principle that the well-being and development of such 
peoples form a sacred trust of civilisation and that securities 
for the performance of this trust should be embodied in this 
Covenant. 

The best method of giving practical effect to this principle is 
that the tutelage of such peoples should be entrusted to ad- 
vanced nations who, by reason of their resources, their experi- 
ence of their geographical position, can best undertake this re- 
sponsibility, and who are willing to accept it, and that this 
tutelage should be exercised by them as Mandatories on behalf 
of the League. 

The character of the mandate must differ according to the 
state of the development of the people, the geographical situa- 
tion of the territory, its economic conditions and other similar 
circumstances. 

Certain communities formerly belonging to the Turkish 
Empire have reached a stage of development where their exist- 
ence as independent nations can be provisionally recognised 
subject to the rendering of administrative advice and assistance 
by a Mandatory until such time as they are able to stand alone. 
The wishes of these communities must be a principal consid- 
eration in the selection of the Mandatory. 

Other people, especially those of Central Africa, are at such 
a stage that the Mandatory must be responsible for the admin- 
istration of the territory under conditions which will guaran- 
tee freedom of conscience and religion subject only to the main- 
tenance of public order and morals, the prohibition of abuses 
such as the slave trade, the arms traffic, and the liquor traffic, 
and the prevention of the stablishment of fortifications or mili- 



Appendix V 233 

tary and naval bases and of military training of the natives 
for other than police purposes and the defence of territory, 
and will also secure equal opportunities for the trade and com- 
merce of other Members of the League. 

There are territories, such as South- West Africa and cer- 
tain of the South Pacific Islands, which, owing to the sparse- 
ness of their population, or their small size, or their remoteness 
from the centres of civilisation, or their geographical con- 
tiguity to the territory of the Mandatory, and other circum- 
stances, can be best administered under the laws of the Man- 
datory as integral portions of its territory, subject to the 
safeguards above mentioned in the interests of the indigenous 
population. 

In every case of mandate, the Mandatory shall render to the 
Council an annual report in reference to the territory commit- 
ted to its charge. 

The degree of authority, control, or administration to be 
exercised by the Mandatory shall, if not previously agreed 
upon by the Members of the League, be explicitly defined in 
each case by the Council. 

A permanent Commission shall be constituted to receive and 
examine the annual reports of the Mandatories and to advise 
the Council on all matters relating to the observance of the 
mandates. 

ARTICLE 23. 

Subject to and in accordance with the provisions of interna- 
tional conventions existing or hereafter to be agreed upon, the 
Members of the League: 

(a) will endeavour to secure and maintain fair and humane 
conditions of labour for men, women, and children, both 
in their own countries and in all countries to which their 
commercial and industrial relations extend, and for that 
purpose will establish and maintain the necessary inter- 
national organisations ; 

(b) undertake to secure just treatment of the native inhabi- 
tants of territories under their control; 

(c) will entrust the League with the general supervision over 
the execution of agreements with regard to the traffic 
in women and children, and the traffic in opium and 
other dangerous drugs; 



234 Appendix V 

(d) will entrust the League with the general supervision of 
the trade in arms and ammunition with the countries in 
which the control of this traffic is necessary to the com- 
mon interest; 

(e) will make provision to secure and maintain freedom of 
communications and of transit and equitable treatment 
for the commerce of all Members of the League. In this 
connection, the special necessities of the regions devas- 
tated during the war of 1914-1918 shall be borne in 
mind; 

(/) will endeavour to take steps in matters of international 
concern for the prevention and control of disease. 

ARTICLE 24. 

There shall be placed under the direction of the League all 
international bureaux already established by general treaties 
if the parties to such treaties consent. All such international 
bureaux and all commissions for the regulation of matters of 
international interest hereafter constituted shall be placed un- 
der the direction of the League. 

In all matters of international interest which are regulated 
by general conventions but which are not placed under the con- 
trol of international bureaux or commissions, the Secretariat of 
the League shall, subject to the consent of the Council and if 
desired by the parties, collect and distribute all relevant infor- 
mation and shall render any other assistance which may be 
necessary or desirable. 

The Council may include as part of the expenses of the Sec- 
retariat the expenses of any bureau or commission which is 
placed under the direction of the League. 

ARTICLE 25. 

The Members of the League agree to encourage and promote 
the establishment and co-operation of duly authorised volun- 
tary national Red Cross organisations having as purposes the 
improvement of health, the prevention of disease, and the miti- 
gation of suffering throughout the world. 

ARTICLE 26. 

Amendments to this Covenant will take effect when ratified 
by the Members of the League whose Representatives compose 



Appendix V 235 

the Council and by a majority of the Members of the League 
whose Representatives compose the Assembly. 

No such amendment shall bind any member of the League 
which signifies its dissent therefrom, but in that case it shall 
cease to be a Member of the League. 

ANNEX. 

I— ORIGINAL MEMBERS OF THE LEAGUE OF 

NATIONS. SIGNATORIES OF THE 

TREATY OF PEACE. 

United States of America. Haiti. 

Belgium. Hedjaz. 

Bolivia. Honduras. 

Brazil. Italy. 

British Empire. Japan. 

Canada. Liberia. 

Australia. Nicaragua. 

South Africa. Panama. 

New Zealand. Peru. 

India. Poland. 

China. Portugal. 

Cuba. Rumania. 

Ecuador. Serb-Croat-Slovene State. 

France. Siam. 

Greece. Czecho-Slovakia. 

Guatemala. Uruguay. 

STATES INVITED TO ACCEDE TO THE COVENANT 

Argentine Republic. Persia. 

Chile. Salvador. 

Colombia. Spain. 

Denmark. Sweden. 

Netherlands. Switzerland. 

Norway. Venezuela. 
Paraguay. 

II.— FIRST SECRETARY-GENERAL OF THE LEAGUE 
OF NATIONS. 

The Honourable Sir James Eric Drummond, K.C.M.G., C.B. 



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